gwt-validation and da future

[Ladislav Gazo]

Welcome all willing to read this,

I have been long and eager contributor of gwt-validation project not
only because it was an initiative worth to support but in general a
good idea. I've (and people I know) spent significant time to support
the project and put it to relevant production state. Yes, we are using
the project in production & Yeah, it was useful.

But after a pretty long period of silence I got an email where I have
to "use my voice" to support version 2.0.... so I asked myself...
where is the version 2.0? Did community know about this move? And if
not, why should a community stand behind a new version when it was
even not informed and taken into the new version?

And after brief examination the 2.0 version is kind of different. All
should be (in production) rebuilt, there is almost no backward
compatibility and it was announced all of the sudden.... has there
been an effort to merge the effort with GWT's one (btw. there was a
strong effort in GWT team to support JSR 303!).

So my conclusion on this is... in future (if any [of this project])
let's work more together as community. I don't have a clue what
happened between 1.0 and 2.0 nor I have "peek" time to investigate it
thoroughly now but if, I would like to support any effort of
implementing JSR 303 in consistent way in GWT.

P.S. If this is a community project and should be treated like this,
consider community as a decision element, not just as slaves willing
to code over their spare time.

Peace on earth :)

[chris.r]

Version 1.0 of this project was written, sadly, to the draft
specification of the JSR. It did not (initially) implement the proper
interfaces and a lot of its validation compatibility was implemented
after the fact. From the time that the JSR-303 specification was
finalized I have thought that the framework would need heavy updating
to be fully compatible. I took it upon myself some time in May 2010
to start working on this as a side project.

You're right, the community, as it exists, should have been
consulted. It's one of the things that I wanted to focus on in the
coming months: building a community that actually communicates. To be
fair, however, the most recent commit before my changes started was in
April 2011. Before that it was you, in January 2011 and September
2010.

So, the 1.0 branch was having some difficulties, namely: lack of
updates and deviation from the JSR-303 standard.

So, why should you stand behind version 2.0? Mainly because it is
easier (measured in the reduction of marker interfaces, and GWT.create
usage) to use, more compliant with the JSR-303 standard, and it has a
more maintainable architecture. (I've already admitted that I should
have tried to engender some discussion beforehand.)

The main reason that v2.0 is different (and it is pretty wildly
different) is that it was updated to support the JSR-303 final
specification. Yes, any existing applications would have to be
rewritten but there's no way to keep the old interfaces and claim to
be compatible with the newest version of the JSR-303 standard. I've
had some discussions with the GWT-Validation team in the past but
they've taken a different approach. I was even involved in some of
their initial planning but nothing really came out of that. You can
see their progress in the gwt trunk and things appear to be coming
along decently but it suffers from some limitations.

The page here: http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/wiki/BeanValidation
is a little light on what the progress is and how much of the JSR is
implemented.

It also appears that it will still rely on hibernate-validator or
another implementation for a server-side validation. I've never liked
that approach.

So, in any case, you're right. We need more community involvement.
But, three months ago I posted this:
http://groups.google.com/group/gwt-validation/browse_thread/thread/9af86e78394ff297
on the groups. I received no feedback on that. I also posted a call
for help on the groups not too long ago: no response.

So yea, I'm willing to work with everyone to get this as far as we
can. Even if that means shutting it down and finding ways to
contribute to the gwt trunk. This is what I've wanted to do since day
1 but that decision went against me a long time ago:
http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit/issues/detail?id=343#c33

I'm looking forward to hearing from everyone else,

Chris

[BST]

I believe GWT-VL 2.0 is simpler to use and it is great for all the basic day to day validations. Probably this itself can be pushed into the trunk or get few GWT core community members to help out. I don't have much experience so I am not sure how I can help out. Probably you guys can list out what are your expectations from community members and what kind of help you need. So that people will identify and assess if they can do that.