June 5th, 2008
GWT fireside chat
I’m still wading through all the notes I took at the Google I/O 2008 conference last week. If you want to see pictures, check out my flickr photoset (183 photos).
While I was there, I went to two sessions called “fireside chats”. Although there was no fire involved, both were great; in fact I think these chats were the highlight of the whole gathering. The first one was hosted by 4 engineers on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) project:
From left to right: Bruce Johnson, Robert Vawter, Miguel Mendez, and Rajeev Dayal.
Everybody else sat around on bean bags and regular folding chairs. Most of the meeting was taken up by Q&A interaction with audience members, but I’ll start with a list of GWT 1.5 features. As you may know, GWT 1.5 release candidate was announced on the first day of the conference.
Features of GWT 1.5
The most visible change in GWT 1.5 is support for all the Java 1.5 syntax and semantics, including generics, parameterized wildcards, and so forth. This had to be supported not just in the compiler, but in the Generate subsystem and the RPC. All the @gwt.typeargs stuff from 1.4 is unnecessary in 1.5; in fact you get a warning asking you to remove that.
GWT 1.5 adds rules and states to widgets for accessibility. This lets screen readers for the blind do something more interesting than reading out table TD tags.
Another new feature is…
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Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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