Is this project active?

[carl.hos...@gmail.com]

Hello all!  I am wondering how active this project is?  Don't see much action on the releases and comments. 

Another question I have is if this project is still active, when will Java 11 support be released?

Thanks  in advance,

Carl

[Jens]

Java 11 language/syntax support has just been committed: https://gwt.googlesource.com/gwt/+/205b88a4d88cc0c23b2cd0df681a18d114443a7c

Currently in the GWT 2.x versions only minimal work will be done. Contributors focus their work on splitting GWT SDK into smaller pieces and make them J2CL compatible (new Java -> JS compiler from Google). This work is happening on Github and CI builds for most of these projects can be found at ci.vertispan.com.

GWT depends on contributors these days, so amount of commits can vary greatly, depending on the free time contributors have.

-- J.

[Peter Donald]

I think the project is more active now than it has been in a long time. It is just that the work is spread out over a few different places. Most work atm seems to be towards getting to GWT3.x The java-to-js compiler is under active development at https://github.com/google/j2cl - the browser apis at https://github.com/google/elemental2. There is also people working on porting the GWT2.x apis to be forward compatible. There also seems to be a few people working on various other frameworks and toolkits.

Chat seems to be best place to keep up and occurs at https://gitter.im/gwtproject/gwt or on other gitter channels.

HTH

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Cheers,

Peter Donald

[Nick Wilton]

It’s very active. See https://gitter.im/gwtproject/gwt

-Nick

--

[Ahmad Bawaneh]

More than ever before.

Event this group indicate that it is a very active project, at least in terms of community, but also development is active around getting GWT 3.0 ready.

[Norbert Bartels]

This is really great to know. 

I really like GWT and building applications with it is awesome. But it is hard to argue against the Angular guys in the company if the latest GWT version is more than 1 year old. But I'm looking forward to see the next update and especially to check GWT 3.0 as soon as it is out someday ;)

Keep up the good work!

Norbert

[Craig Mitchell]

+1 keep up the great work!

I took a break from GWT to develop in React for 2 years.  While the React structure is okay, writing in JS is just painful.  TypeScript looked a little better, but never got the chance to dive into it.  Now I'm back using GWT and loving it!

Also finding it hard to argue for GWT against the Angular and React people in the company, especially as Java 11 (and 12) is becoming the norm.  Looking forward to GWT3.0!

[Peter Donald]

On Mon, Apr 8, 2019 at 2:34 PM Craig Mitchell <ma...@craig-mitchell.com> wrote:

I took a break from GWT to develop in React for 2 years.  While the React structure is okay, writing in JS is just painful.  TypeScript looked a little better, but never got the chance to dive into it.  Now I'm back using GWT and loving it!

You can use both of them together ;) We use react+GWT and absolutely love it. We use a state management library Arez (https://arez.github.io/) which is very similar conceptually to Mobx done in Java style. You can see a sample application @ https://github.com/react4j/react4j-todomvc/tree/arez_maven/src/main/java/react4j/todomvc

We are still on Java8/GWT2.X but hopefully by mid year our apps will be cut across to Java11/J2CL+closure compiler. So far everything is looking good ;)

--

Cheers,

Peter Donald

[Craig Mitchell]

You can use both of them together ;) We use react+GWT and absolutely love it. We use a state management library Arez (https://arez.github.io/) which is very similar conceptually to Mobx done in Java style. You can see a sample application @ https://github.com/react4j/react4j-todomvc/tree/arez_maven/src/main/java/react4j/todomvc

That is very cool!  I couldn't get Super Dev Mode working due to:

[ERROR] linkers other than CrossSiteIFrameLinker aren't supported. Found: com.google.gwt.core.linker.SingleScriptLinker

However, the GWT compile worked fine, and it ran on my Tomcat server.  Going to dive into the code to see how easy/hard it would be to use existing React components.

Thanks sharing the project!  :-)

[Peter Donald]

On Fri, Apr 12, 2019 at 1:04 PM Craig Mitchell <ma...@craig-mitchell.com> wrote:

You can use both of them together ;) We use react+GWT and absolutely love it. We use a state management library Arez (https://arez.github.io/) which is very similar conceptually to Mobx done in Java style. You can see a sample application @ https://github.com/react4j/react4j-todomvc/tree/arez_maven/src/main/java/react4j/todomvc

That is very cool!  I couldn't get Super Dev Mode working due to:

[ERROR] linkers other than CrossSiteIFrameLinker aren't supported. Found: com.google.gwt.core.linker.SingleScriptLinker

This may be true running the TodomvcProd.gwt.xml but if you run TodomvcDev.gwt.xml it should be fine. We don't use Maven at work so I may have misconfigured the tooling :/

 

However, the GWT compile worked fine, and it ran on my Tomcat server.  Going to dive into the code to see how easy/hard it would be to use existing React components.

We *used* to use existing react components but due to differences between the different environments it always felt a bit clunky and I am not sure how easy it would be to do at this stage. You would probably need to use jsinterop to get the react component type and write a custom builder to create the component and it should be possible but we don't do this anymore. We found it is easier to just port the component and keep in java land.

--

Cheers,

Peter Donald

[Craig Mitchell]

This may be true running the TodomvcProd.gwt.xml but if you run TodomvcDev.gwt.xml it should be fine. We don't use Maven at work so I may have misconfigured the tooling :/

I did try to run the TodomvcDev.gwt.xml, however, I needed to remove TodomvcProd from GWT General Settings (using Eclipse).  Now works great!  Thanks!

Also, thanks for the heads up on reusing existing React components.  :-)

[Bob Lacatena]

GWT is suffering from a very serious publicity debacle.  I'm actively doing GWT development, and regretting every moment of it right now.  Years ago I loved GWT.  Today, I'm dreading it.

My biggest problem for the past year has been the fact that unless one hunts for threads like this, GWT does appear to be dead.  I don't know what the developers are doing.  I just know there were occasional hints that something was coming (a year ago), with not a sound since then.

Update gwtproject.org!  Put a few news items on it a month, at least.  Let people know you are working.  No matter how good your work is, more and more developers like me are going to abandon it as time drags on.

Or create a GWT 3.0 blog.  Something.  Anything other than the black hole of silence you have now.

I'm also very concerned that with the rewrite, every bit of code I'm working on now will be useless.  GWT before 3.0, from a developer who uses it, was and still is a nightmare if you don't want to use every widget, as it exists, out of the box, because too many of the classes use private members and methods, making them completely impossible to extend (which, I believe, is sort of the point of a lot of OOP concepts).

With GWT getting old, this is becoming painful, because GWT did cool things, like animation and date pickers and rich text editors, by brute force back when that was necessary.  Now, however, HTML5 and other things have evolved to offer better, cleaner solutions, but often it's difficult to impossible to make GWT work with those solutions, because of the private members.

I've even gotten into vicious cycles; copy the source for class X, to be able to fix it, but that requites a copy of private class Y, which requires a copy of private class Z, and on and on until I give up.

Instead, I have to "roll my own", which takes too much effort that could be spend on more productive pursuits.  I'd rather use a framework with working widgets.

I didn't start out intending this to be a rant, but the bottom line is that I like GWT, I like being able to work exclusively in one language/framework instead of four at one time (Java + Angular + TypeScript + JQuery), but as a professional who is paid to make decisions that will have a decade-long impact on my company, I am very hard-pressed not to advise my company to immediately abandon all efforts using GWT.

Put some effort into communication!  [Which should be tattooed on the backs of every software engineer's hands, because as a species they seem to be oblivious to the concept.]

I am somewhat heartened by the existence of this thread, but I can't wait 6 months for GWT 3.0, only to find out it's not backwards compatible with much of our efforts, and it's lost so much popularity in the wild that it's considered a death-mark on one's resume.

- Bob

[Rob Newton]

I can sympathise with some of what Bob is saying.

From what I can gather there is actually a great flux of activity going on behind the scenes by parts of the community.  The main players in moving GWT forward appear to be half-a-dozen or so companies who use GWT greatly, and some individuals, often doing it on their own personal time.

As Bob says, the gwtproject.org site makes it appear that GWT is in limbo.  If a newcomer or existing user puts some time into searching posts in this group and the contributors one, or the occasional blog post somewhere, they start to see a rough roadmap, and some progress is being made towards it by the community.  But as he says, there needs to be some defacto site explaining the roadmap, and make some recommendations on what parts of traditional GWT 2 to keep using or not, and what new stuff is available (elemental2, jsinterop, etc), and some basics on how to use the new stuff.

It was only by searching the newsgroups that I learnt about the existance of jsinterop-base, and only through more searching that I saw a few examples of using it (and also looking at the API).  This is a pretty important/useful package.

Further research uncovers that much of the gwt-user package is being split out into individual packages, org.gwtproject.* , to not depend on JSNI and generators.  Quite a few are done, according to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b1D9fEqRh5lZ8cqMJtYoc_25rfTRvsuJkTtS2vjgi3o .  They are scattered all around github it seems, not ready for maven central?

A contributor may develop something new or port something, and then announce it to the community that it is available for use, but there is no central site listing/promoting these wares.

Perhaps things are in too much flux to attract new developers to using GWT.  Perhaps the goal should be to retain existing GWT users?  The more users there are, the more contributors there will be, and the better GWT will be for all of us.  Conversely, the fewer users there are, ... .

(It's easy for me (a non-contributor) to list some shortcomings, but am I going to volunteer my personal time to improve things?  Or do I expect Google to do everything, and I just use it and give nothing back?)

[Frank Hossfeld]

Bob, you are right! At the moment, there is no communication, so GWT might look dead. 

The only way to get informations for now  is to visit the Gitter rooms for gwtproject https://gitter.im/gwtproject/gwt and j2cl https://gitter.im/vertispan/j2cl.  

Many contributors are working on GWT 3 to get it work. 

* create gwt modules that work with j2cl (remove JSNI, replace generators, etc)

* Colin and Dimitrii (I think) are working on maven j2cl plugins

* Ahmad has written a really nice widget lib which will be j2cl ready (https://github.com/DominoKit/domino-ui)

Many others are working on frameworks that will work with j2cl like:

* Elemento 

* autorest

* Nalu 

* mvp4g2

* etc.

and many more (sorry, if I missed something and for sure I will, there are a lot more). All these libs need to be tested with j2cl, needs docs, etc. This is a lot of work, that the contributors are doing in their rare free time.

Once, we got more things working, we will move the migrated modules to maven central and do announce them. 

And of course we need to update gwtproject.org. But, this is only reasonable once we got things working and know, what to write.

For all of you, who are missing more informations, visit the Gitter rooms. 

[Ahmad Bawaneh]

@Bob

We do really understand how you feel, we were there at some point. BUT

On Thursday, May 30, 2019 at 10:31:38 PM UTC+3, Bob Lacatena wrote:

GWT is suffering from a very serious publicity debacle.  I'm actively doing GWT development, and regretting every moment of it right now.  Years ago I loved GWT.  Today, I'm dreading it.

My biggest problem for the past year has been the fact that unless one hunts for threads like this, GWT does appear to be dead.  I don't know what the developers are doing.  I just know there were occasional hints that something was coming (a year ago), with not a sound since then.

Who are the developers we are talking about here?! GWT is an open source project now managed and maintained by the community, it is not like that we have a team with named members, We are a few who volunteered to do the work in our spare time, and even while we were low in numbers in past year we managed to make a big progress :

• Most of the GWT2 modules ported to GWT3.0.
• Built lots of libs that works in both GWT2 and GWT3.
• Built small apps and samples to test with j2cl.
• Contributing to elemental2 and Closure for a better elemental2 API.
• We now have a working j2cl maven plugin.

 

Update gwtproject.org!  Put a few news items on it a month, at least.  Let people know you are working.  No matter how good your work is, more and more developers like me are going to abandon it as time drags on.

Or create a GWT 3.0 blog.  Something.  Anything other than the black hole of silence you have now.

We would love to do this, currently all the news, discussions, and announcements are all in the gitter channels mentioned in frank reply or in these groups, Which are not really bad for a work that is not yet 100% complete and being done by very few in our spare time. We welcome and Volunteer(s) who would step up to maintain a page in the gwtproject site for such purpose, but it is not something we can handle with the current man and time power we have.

 

I'm also very concerned that with the rewrite, every bit of code I'm working on now will be useless.  GWT before 3.0, from a developer who uses it, was and still is a nightmare if you don't want to use every widget, as it exists, out of the box, because too many of the classes use private members and methods, making them completely impossible to extend (which, I believe, is sort of the point of a lot of OOP concepts).

With GWT getting old, this is becoming painful, because GWT did cool things, like animation and date pickers and rich text editors, by brute force back when that was necessary.  Now, however, HTML5 and other things have evolved to offer better, cleaner solutions, but often it's difficult to impossible to make GWT work with those solutions, because of the private members.

I've even gotten into vicious cycles; copy the source for class X, to be able to fix it, but that requites a copy of private class Y, which requires a copy of private class Z, and on and on until I give up.

Instead, I have to "roll my own", which takes too much effort that could be spend on more productive pursuits.  I'd rather use a framework with working widgets.

In general if expect ZERO breaking changes in GWT3.0 it will mean that we are not actually changing anything, which is not useful, what we are doing for porting from GWT2 is make sure that we introduce the minimum breaking changes most are in the imports, and gwt widgets were made when we had old IE browsers and HTML5 was not yet getting enough browsers support, still even now gwt widgets are being migrated for backward compatibility, yet there is nothing prevent any of us from using HTML5 in our gwt2 apps right now, we have many libs that leverage html5 for gwt2 and of course working in gwt3 too, we have elemental2, elemento, Nalu, and a set of tools from dominokit including domino-ui.

With that said and knowing that GWT2 is being ported and some new libs are being made to work with GWT3, we should not expect every old gwt lib out there to work out of the box with gwt3.0, those libs will also needs to migrate, and this is another area for volunteers to offer help.

 

I didn't start out intending this to be a rant, but the bottom line is that I like GWT, I like being able to work exclusively in one language/framework instead of four at one time (Java + Angular + TypeScript + JQuery), but as a professional who is paid to make decisions that will have a decade-long impact on my company, I am very hard-pressed not to advise my company to immediately abandon all efforts using GWT.

Put some effort into communication!  [Which should be tattooed on the backs of every software engineer's hands, because as a species they seem to be oblivious to the concept.]

We welcome any suggestions and ideas here, we currently use gitter and these groups, if any one is suggesting a better alternatives we dont mind, any volunteer wants to manage this we also dont mind, actually we are seeking help with and would love to communicate in a way that is more public than what we currently do.

 

I am somewhat heartened by the existence of this thread, but I can't wait 6 months for GWT 3.0, only to find out it's not backwards compatible with much of our efforts, and it's lost so much popularity in the wild that it's considered a death-mark on one's resume. 

- Bob

With all that said, i would like to add that there is nothing today that prevent us from writing apps or updating existing ones to work with GWT3, we already build for GWT3 in mind, you can use the ported modules, yo can use elementa2, and you can use any of the new libs being made, this will also help us with testing and fixing bugs early and even taking decisions.

Have you checked my post the other day
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-web-toolkit/HzwmFhSVa0Q

those works on both gwt2 and gwt3/j2cl, and i am alreay using them in one of our big applications at work.

I will be honest here and SHOUT for help, we need more people to help us move faster, we need more people to publish our work, we need more people to help us testing

[Peter Donald]

On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 10:55 AM Rob Newton <robn...@gmail.com> wrote:

A contributor may develop something new or port something, and then announce it to the community that it is available for use, but there is no central site listing/promoting these wares.

A central place would be nice and has been tried before but it takes a lot of effort to establish it and keep it going.

Perhaps things are in too much flux to attract new developers to using GWT.  Perhaps the goal should be to retain existing GWT users?  The more users there are, the more contributors there will be, and the better GWT will be for all of us.  Conversely, the fewer users there are, ... .

I think that is the point porting the GWT2.x modules to jsinterop. To help retain existing users.

There is also a lot of companies that have abandoned all of those framework libraries and just use jsinterop and java to js compiler. Vue-GWT seems successful. We use react+GWT and find it invaluable. I think all of googles stuff probably does this.

 

(It's easy for me (a non-contributor) to list some shortcomings, but am I going to volunteer my personal time to improve things?  Or do I expect Google to do everything, and I just use it and give nothing back?)

I don't think Google is really responsible. I expect that in time that the jre layer + jsinterop library will probably move out of GWT and into their own repositories so they can be more easily used by J2CL (googles replacement java-to-js compiler) at which point I am not sure how much work will go on in the current GWT repo. However I expect work in the elemental2, j2cl and other repos to continue.

--

Cheers,

Peter Donald