GWT/Spring Update

[Chris Ramsdale]

I wanted to take a moment and update everyone on the progress the GWT and Roo teams are making, as well as address some of the concern regarding forum support over the past few milestones.

Both teams are extremely active right now, quickly iterating towards the next milestone which we expect to have the final cut of APIs and implementations. We have had to cut a few features along the way, but these cuts were made in lieu of stability and overall product polish. That doesn't mean they're cut for good, just cut for this release. In fact both teams are already discussing a fairly quick follow-up release that would include some of this goodness. So why not just hold off? It's a good question, but at some point you have to draw a line in the sand, freeze features, and focus on the quality necessary to get it shipped.

In regard overall concern about the projects, neither GWT or Roo are going away. To echo Ben's previous points, the two projects are more alive and active than they ever have been. There's a clear shift to could-based solutions, which not only includes running server-side components on premise or in a hosted environment, but running rich complex apps in the browser. The integration efforts between Roo and GWT are dead set on making this as easy as possible.

Our forum support, at least from the Google side, has been a bit sparse and we know it. It's not from a lack of desire, but rather the fact we've been completely saturated with writing the code to support the integration as well as the framework that it targets. When you find an issue that you believe to be a showstopper, the best way to get feedback is through Roo's issue tracker. We expect to have more time to dedicate to conversations on the forums as the bits begin to stabilize.

As always, thanks for you feedback and contributions. The Spring community is one of the most respected out there, and we're happy to be a part of the developer tools that you use.

Chris Ramsdale, Google Web Toolkit team

[simonwhelan76]

thanks Chris for all your teams effort so far, Ben's posted some an excellent explanation about how strapped your development resources are.

As a side note, if possible could you focus some of your teams effort around some documentation ASAP, I try to keep up with the GWT mailing list but truck is suck a moving target, with no doc's either its hard to get my head around things (name rechanges, deprecated code, etc) ...

Also would love to see some effort on integrating Spring Security out of the box...and an little same app.

But please pass on my appreciation for all your teams and Ben's effort and keep up the great work.

simon