According to Thomas Broyer, the plans for upcoming releases of GWT changed a little bit. In the comments of a Google+ post, he wrote the following:
The plan has shifted a bit. We’ll do a 2.7 near June, and will try to do a 3.0-alpha soon after that. And 3.0 will land at the end of the year (or early next year, like 2.6.0 this year).
So opposed to earlier plans, version 3.0 will not be the one after 2.6.x but there will be an additional version 2.7.
He also wrote about the currently planned features of the 2.7 release:
The goal for 2.7 is to have incremental compilation (that will tremendously speed up Super Dev Mode) and a beta of JsInterop (and remove support for IE6/7, and maybe deprecate support for IE8). And 3.0 will remove support for IE8.
Details are still being discussed.
As many people get nervous about Java 8 support in GWT, the following sounds very promising:
Java 8 seems to be in good shape for being supported in 2.7, at least at the language level. Emulation will require more work though (java.time!)
From my point of view this is very good news. We will get some of the new stuff early and don’t have to wait for a delayed 3.0 release. With a little bit of luck we can use Java 8 syntax (lambdas, method references, …) and the missing Java 8 API parts can probably be supported by additional libraries in the meantime until 3.0 is ready.
One last thing: About GWT 2.6.1, Thomas Broyer writes:
And yes, we’ll do a 2.6.1 very soon.
It seems that 2014 will be an exciting GWT year :)
If you or anyone reading wants to play with java 8 and either help add emulation support, or just file bugs that you find, I’m maintaining a preview of Ray Cromwell’s java 8 feature branch (with enhancements to make lambdas work 100%): https://github.com/WeTheInternet/gwt-sandbox/releases
2.6.1 RC 2: http://blog.oio.de/2014/05/01/gwt-2-6-1-release-coming-soon/
Why GWT has not been presented at the last Google I/O ?
Good Question. I was wondering that when i first 2014 I/O schedule
There was a GWT meetup in the days before Google I/O:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gwt-steering/gkhYO3bBv7Y
In addition there is a conference named “GWT.create” completely focussed on GWT (http://gwtcreate.com/). So I guess there is no special need to have talks about GWT on Google I/O.
There is an alternative tool similar to GWT called Dragome. But this one is about compiling bytecode to js, and it also has UI components support. Things like Incremental compiling, Java 8, HTML template are already supported.
And there is no need to wait to ECMAScript 6 to be standardized because it already allows use of dynamic proxies continuation (js yield), classes, lambda (arrow functions).
Project URL: http://www.dragome.com
LOL, people are still using GWT? Worst web framework ever created… No wonder Google is distancing itself from it.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill on democracy: It is the worst…except for all the others :^)