The future of GWT

… will be very exciting. Daniel Kurka, member of the GWT Steering Comittee, published his and Ray Cromwell‘s slides of their Google I/O session “GWT Roadmap for the Future”.

First of all, there is a new GWT project page created by the steering committee. The project site seems to be better structured than the current one, at least the documentation and the articles are first class citizens now…

For example: stumbling across the page I found a nice video from Andrew Bowers introducing the GWT SDK. I can’t say if the view was already there in the past. If so, it was so nicely hidden that I was not able to find it.

So, what about the GWT future? Well, from what we can take from the slides, there is really a lot to come. The upcoming releases will be focussing on the following goals:

• Openness and Simplicity
• Speed
• Interoperability
• Mobility
• Reliability
• Embeddability

The talk further explains how the team expects to achieve these goals. The roadmap is not (yet?) online, and we can’t tell when all the mentioned features will become available, but we already know that there are at least two releases planned:

The highlights from my point of view are:

• GWT has a new Git repository and public CI server hosted by Red Hat.
• It’s been worked on speed improvements of the GWT compiler
• Java 7 and 8 support
• Focus on mobility

It is also stated that the top 100 bugs from the issue tracker will be closed. It is unclear what “top” and “bugs” means right now: the top voted issue is classified as “feature” and not as “defect”.

So it seems that GWT is back again.  And I’m looking forward to the recording of this session being published on YouTube.