Voice of the GWT Committee???

[JonL]

We've been using GWT for a long time.  There was some trepidation when Google moved GWT into the open source realm and the steering committee was announced.  A lot of good things are happening.  I see a lot of movement here and there, but some of it appears as if it is un-directed and un-coordinated.  Without joining like 15 different groups, it seems impossible to get a full understanding of what is happening in GWT.  As a project that is currently utilized by projects of many levels, I think the only thing that keeps GWT at the forefront of anyones mind at this time has more to do with inertia than anything else.  The closest thing that I can come by, which appears to pull the disparate parts of GWT community together is gwtdaily.com blog, but there is no indication how that is run, it is not linked between any of the other gwt sites

So here's my questions:

Are there any plans to create a "Voice of GWT" presence anywhere which could act as a goto location to view progress, like the old GWT blog?

Besides each steering committee member advocating GWT as used in their paradigm, is there anyone who is considered the advocate for just GWT itself.  IE Vaadin promotes Vaadin, ArcBees promotes GWT-P and their various GWT projects, Sencha promotes GXT, who is going out and saying, lets just use GWT?

I think if there was one person who was acting as part of the GWT steering committee as that advocate that had a blog and was able to take the time to bring all the disparate threads together to present a overall view of the current development plan and future of GWT and status of the major efforts under the various tents, I think that would go a long way to assuaging many peoples fears that GWT is dying out and becoming irrelevant.

Or even just a central blog where members of the committee would commit to posting regularly.  The Google+ community is good, but I see as more of a discussion board and not just the platform where the community can announce things.

The format of gwtdaily.com is good and I see that people can submit posts to it so that might be a good location, I believe it is run by a contributor/committee member, but it doesn't appear official and has no links from the official GWT sites.

[Brian Pedersen]

+1 all the way.

I use every chance I have to spread the word about the changes JS Interop will bring to the web, but the apparent lack of engagement in the community from the people driving GWT, is giving me second thoughts.

The official blog used to be OK, but that changed when google open sourced it, and now the closest you get to official information is 6 months old videos on youtube.

I believe this is already driving people away from GWT, at a time where we should be getting people back, drawn by the awesomeness of GWT 3.0.

[Ignacio Baca Moreno-Torres]

IMHO current organization is pretty good, docs in the official page, news in google+, question and issues in Google groups and you can always chat with the community in ##gwt. All this 4 places are easy to contribute, so if you see less info and news is just because the community is not very news friendly ;). And! I don't think this is bad at all. Maybe is only motivated by the evolution of GWT, which start as a web framework but now a days is more a java2js transpiler (at least is the more important and evolving part, and I think than most of the work by the committee is in the compiler side of GWT), and I think that front-end communities are just more likely to share lot of cool things than compiler communities. 

You probably find a lot of more cool things in the gxt, vaadin or errai blogs, which are front end frameworks.

If you want to see 'not so cool' but much more technical interenting news you just subscribe to this feed https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/commits/master.atom

At least, that's how I see it... ;)

On the other hand, I also think that exists some level of confusion/misinformation, but it's not a critical situation and if you spent some time in google groups, gerrit or github you end up knowing exactly what's happening (doubts to google+ and ##irc).

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[JonL]

So I agree with you 99%.  What we disagree is on this point:

On the other hand, I also think that exists some level of confusion/misinformation, but it's not a critical situation and if you spent some time in google groups, gerrit or github you end up knowing exactly what's happening (doubts to google+ and ##irc).

I believe it is a critical situation for people who might want to come into the community or for those attempting to justify not moving to something new.

There is no clear roadmap on the main GWT site..  Search for GWT Roadmap, the first result is a link stating GWT 2.8 will be out in 3 months, back in January.

There is no clear status of the next release on the main GWT site.  There is no clear status of the next release or when it can be expected or what are the blockers on the Contributor forum here.  GWT 2.8 milestone on GitHub is only 14%, there are only 3 closed issues and the last release of GWT is almost a year now and only 1 person appears to be working on the next release planned features if those issues are the plan because there is no other apparent plan that has been laid out that I can find accessible.

There is no promotion on the main GWT site of the only currently scheduled GWT conference and the normally already scheduled GWT.create conference, there is no chatter about.

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[Thomas Broyer]

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 2:15:22 AM UTC+2, JonL wrote:

There is no clear status of the next release or when it can be expected or what are the blockers on the Contributor forum here.

This is not exact: https://groups.google.com/d/topic/gwt-steering/uv_WsmNkti0/discussion

(not saying it's plain wrong either !)

 

GWT 2.8 milestone on GitHub is only 14%, there are only 3 closed issues and the last release of GWT is almost a year now and only 1 person appears to be working on the next release planned features if those issues are the plan because there is no other apparent plan that has been laid out that I can find accessible.

The migration of issues from Google Code to GitHub earlier this summer didn't keep the detailed "status" field, only a boolean open/close. At Google Code, we used to keep issues opened with a FixedNotReleased status until the next release (because, I believe, most people don't search for closed issues). Knowing that, if you look closer, you can see that 13 open issues assigned to Milestone 2.8 are actually "FixedNotReleased": https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues?q=is%3Aissue+milestone%3A2.8+FixedNotReleased

But yes, the issue tracker needs some love, and I proposed a process (and have some open questions) to the Steering Committee.

 

There is no promotion on the main GWT site of the only currently scheduled GWT conference and the normally already scheduled GWT.create conference, there is no chatter about.

Conference organizers are probably the ones who should promote their conference; GWT core contributors don't have time for that. But anyone can promote the conferences, anywhere.

The web site is open to contributions <http://www.gwtproject.org/makinggwtbetter.html#webpage> and it just happens that nobody (organizers, or anyone in the community) proposed (pull request or even just an issue) to promote the conference on the site.

[Alberto Mancini]

 

There is no promotion on the main GWT site of the only currently scheduled GWT conference and the normally already scheduled GWT.create conference, there is no chatter about.

Conference organizers are probably the ones who should promote their conference; GWT core contributors don't have time for that. But anyone can promote the conferences, anywhere.

The web site is open to contributions <http://www.gwtproject.org/makinggwtbetter.html#webpage> and it just happens that nobody (organizers, or anyone in the community) proposed (pull request or even just an issue) to promote the conference on the site.

This point is my fault probably, or at least something that matter me firsthand being one of the organizers of GWTcon2015.

I Never minded to ask for a note in the site, actually there's not a section for news on gwtproject and asking for a note on the front page was too much promotional.
GWTcon has been promoted at our best actually trough all the channels we can reach but any help is definitely appreciated. 

Last but not least, any info on GWTcon is available at: www.gwtcon.org and there's a Q&A organized by Arcbees scheduled for
October 28th https://plus.google.com/+ChristianGoudreau/posts/SNMUJbF2jha

and, well, just ask me if you want informations.

Cheers,
Alberto

[Thomas Broyer]

On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 1:07:49 PM UTC+2, Alberto Mancini wrote:

 

There is no promotion on the main GWT site of the only currently scheduled GWT conference and the normally already scheduled GWT.create conference, there is no chatter about.

Conference organizers are probably the ones who should promote their conference; GWT core contributors don't have time for that. But anyone can promote the conferences, anywhere.

The web site is open to contributions <http://www.gwtproject.org/makinggwtbetter.html#webpage> and it just happens that nobody (organizers, or anyone in the community) proposed (pull request or even just an issue) to promote the conference on the site.

This point is my fault probably, or at least something that matter me firsthand being one of the organizers of GWTcon2015.

I Never minded to ask for a note in the site, actually there's not a section for news on gwtproject and asking for a note on the front page was too much promotional. 

GWT.create was promoted that way last year and I see no reason GWTcon couldn't have been promoted the same way (I for one wouldn't have opposed it at least ;-) )

That said, I think you managed the promotion quite well, even without such link on the front page; maybe you could ask Vaadin if they have stats of how many people came to the GWT.create site from gwtproject.org.

And maybe next year we'll have a "news" or "events" section on the site, or you'll have a banner in the front page ;-)

[JonL]

Thanks for the link Thomas!  I knew something along this line must exist.  However, it appears that the GWT Steering google group is not listed on the GWT Resources page, so it is kind of hidden from view and I was unaware it existed.

I made a suggested edit and pull request to have it added to the GWT Resources page.

[JonL]

Alberto,

I will also say that I think you did a great job of promoting GWTCon and my comments should only be taken in terms of visibility of people who might not be entrenched in the community so steeply as we all are.  Someone new coming into GWT, what does the message, brand and presence say to them, if their first landing page is gwtproject.org.

I am probably also slightly frustrated because I can not attend GWTCon and there appear no plans for GWT.create yet and I can not make plans yet to attend.