Google takes a major step towards assuring GWTs future
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
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It's really good news for developers using the Google Web Toolkit: the
Mountain View giant took steps this week to assure the future of GWT, its
popular open-source web-app development tool. While the product
has seen a rapid increase in its adoption by developers, and even been
credited with a jump in new Java users, there has been uneasiness in the
software community about Google's level of commitment to the product.
The fact that Google is in the early stages of developing a competing
language for web coders, DART, has not made GWT users feel more
confidant about the product's future.
But GWT (the language we at Members
Only have adopted for all our future web development) is so widely used that it
now has a lively aftermarket and numerous large corporate users, all of whom are
invested in GWT's continued well-being.
It is these firms that sought, and won, the creation of the new
committee that will oversee GWT's development. They include Sencha and Vaadin, the developers of two popular libraries that build
on to GWT, as well Linux giant Red Hat
and web developers ArcBees. Google
will also have a seat on the committee, and Google's current project manager for
GWT, Ray Cromwell, will be the initial chair of the group. The steering
committee will govern the open-source development of GWT, including determining
who can commit code to the project repository, and selecting features for each
release. Cromwell pointed out in his announcement that the process is similar to
that governing the development of Eclipse, the widely used Java code-editing
tool, which was created at IBM but handed over to the Eclipse Foundation.
GWT 2.5, the final release under the old Google-controlled process, is
due out in August. Reports at Google I/O are that it produces much smaller code
and compiles much faster, both good news for users.