Recently I’ve been working on some Google Web Toolkit (GWT) libraries that involve JSON and JSONP. While working on this project, I’ve been reminded just how tricky AJAX can be. It’s no secret that there are a lot of people out there who spend huge portions of their lives thinking up ways to steal your data (or worse). Unfortunately, the same cool tricks that let you build AJAX sites and mashups also make it easy to build unsafe web applicati

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) engineering team in our Atlanta Engineering office and participating in our Atlanta open house (read about how it went). This was a fun event mostly designed to let the Atlanta community hear about what our engineers are working on in Midtown Atlanta. That is, what we’re working on outside of hiring more people.
I’m eager to share some photos, which include an appearance by Pr

As we had hoped, GWT 1.3 RC 2 has proved stable and is ready to graduate today, making build 1.3.3 the official GWT 1.3 distribution. If you’ve been waiting to upgrade to 1.3, it’s ready when you are. In case you missed the news, GWT 1.3 is the first fully open source version of GWT. Our open source charter, “Making GWT Better,” explained that GWT development would take place in the open, and that we’d even publish our engineering meeting note

We’re thrilled with the response to the 100% open source launch last month: lots of people downloaded GWT, the activity picked up on the Developer Forum, and we’ve received some great advice on the Contributor Forum (which helps make GWT better). Now that the holidays are behind us, we’ve packed up the second release candidate for version 1.3. We expect that this binary will actually turn into the final 1.3 release, but we want to give it some

Today is quite a milestone for Google Web Toolkit: with the GWT 1.3 Release Candidate, our team is very happy to announce that all of GWT is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. There’s a lot to say, but let’s start with our mission: “To radically improve the web experience for users by enabling developers to use existing Java tools to build no-compromise AJAX for any modern browser.” Since our primary mission is to help users (as opposed

If you missed The Ajax Experience conference back in October, you can still catch Bruce Johnson’s talk online, thanks to TheServerSide.com. In this talk, Bruce discusses Google Web Toolkit’s performance and interoperability; it’s a great introduction to GWT with lots of demos and sample code.

After all the posts about Google Web Toolkit version 1.2 is getting ready for release, Google Web Toolkit Blog today announced its release. As with other Google new releases, Google Web Toolkit v1.2 comes with new features and dozens of bugs fixed. The new feature is that you can now develop and debug with GWT on Mac OS X in addition to Linux and Windows

After a couple weeks of fixing all the issues our developer community has so
diligently reported in the issue tracker, we are happy to announce the official release of Google Web Toolkit 1.2 today.

As we mentioned when we released the 1.2 Release Candidate, you can now develop and debug with GWT on Mac OS X in addition to Linux and Windows

Many thanks to everyone who has tried out the GWT 1.2 Release Candidate so far. We hope you like the new OS X support and the optimized hosted mode reload time, and hopefully you’ve benefited from all the other fixes and enhancements as well. I wanted to summarize a few bug reports we’ve received related to new functionality in 1.2 RC (build 1.2.11) and give a quick update. There was a bug related to whitespace in filenames that was discussed

We’re happy to announce our first release candidate for Google Web Toolkit 1.2, which has a number of highly requested features and bug fixes: Full support for OS X development Develop with GWT on OS X as easily as on Linux and Windows Much faster hosted mode Debug your GWT apps much more quickly. Hosted mode startup time has improved significantly — and even better, refreshes are now lightning-fast — even when your source code changes. New

We are excited to tell you about two changes to GWT today based on your feedback in the GWT developer forum. First, we’ve transitioned to using a real issue tracking system on Google Code so that you can report issues and workarounds directly to our issues database rather than just talking about them in the forum. This has been one of the most requested features in the forum, and we hope it will help make our development process more transp

Three big cheers for the GWT community!
The posts on the GWT developer forum have been amazing. The posts are interesting technically, and it’s great to see everyone supporting each other so courteously.
The great discussions (and, of course, the occasional bug reports about GWT 1.1.0 motivated us to do an update as fast as we could, so
we’ve been working extra hard the last couple weeks to turn around another update quickly, and we’re happy

As promised in the last episode (this still counts as early August, right?) , we’re happy to report that today is the day! Version 1.1 of GWT is now available. We ended up being able to wrap in a few additional bug fixes and feature requests to hopefully make your development even more productive. So, in addition to the new features we mentioned previously, GWT 1.1 also includes: Automatic resource injection
Modules can contain references to ext

Did you miss us? We haven’t spent quite as much time answering questions on the GWT group lately because the GWT engineering team has been heads-down the last few weeks, busily working on your most-requested features and squashing your most-reported bugs. In addition to the items already marked “Fix in Progress” on the issues list, the new version of GWT (coming in early August) will include LocalizationEasily localize strings and formatted mess

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Bill Donahue’s Openfount, a library that lets you use GWT without running a web server by leveraging Amazon’s S3 service. Read more about it on Jon Udell’s blog.

Bruce Perry just published a nice GWT tutorial over at XML.com, walking through GWT Ant build configuration, RPCs, and using GWT RemoteServiceServlets with Tomcat.

GWT developers have been energetic in the past few weeks. A few examples: Ryan Dewsbury created GWT-powered gpokr, a cool multiplayer no-limit Texas Hold’Em implementation with real-time chat. Our favorite office time-waster is Mark Roth ’s GWT Hang Man. Another developer has also started work on a more ambitious photo-sharing site called myNetImages, built with GWT. Check out the GWT Site blog for a nice collection of links and information.
On t

We’re really happy that so many people have started digging into the Google Web Toolkit! If you’re new to GWT, check out Robert Cooper’s nice tutorial on getting started with GWT. If you’re already a seasoned GWT veteran (it’s been out almost 3 weeks, after all :-), then you might find some of these links interesting: In addition to his GWT widget library, Robert Hanson’s blog discusses a variety of useful GWT topics, including RPC basics an

We just released Google Web Toolkit 1.0.21 to the GWT web site. This release fixes a number of bugs from our first release last week, inlcuding: Issue #5823700 - GWT hosted mode does not work when IE 7 is installed Issue #8840603 - GWT applications do not run in IE 7 Issue #3844117 - Cannot reference a final local variable from a deep inner class Issue #9157420 - Compiler reports errors for non-ASCII ch

We are excited to finally release Google Web Toolkit to the world today. We are going to use this blog to publish official updates, GWT tips and tricks, and notify the GWT developer community of new releases. The easiest way to be notified of changes to GWT is to subscribe to our Atom feed.
If you are at JavaOne, make sure you come see our tech lead, Bruce Johnson, in his session on GWT tomorrow, May 17, at 12:15 pm in the Moscone Center Gatewa