Re: What is planned release date for GWT 2.8 (with lambdas) ?

I'll report a bit of data:

We have an app that uses GWT only for "headless" stuff (it's part of a larger Angular application).  We have about 142k lines of GWT code.  We recently built GWT from the tip of master (541858e0), and saw no issues in upgrading to that from 2.7.0.

As we've started using lambdas in our code, we have run into one issue, https://github.com/gwtproject/gwt/issues/8991.  We tried simply updating to the new tip of master (which purports to contain the fix), but that caused Guava to start failing because they haven't released a version that contains https://github.com/google/guava/commit/9e56ef17c335319d21f1f2c454176c9d32687a59 yet.  So instead of trying to also build guava from master, for now we've just refactored the offending code to use a named inner class.

All in all, we're pretty happy with running from GWT master so far.  I should also note that this app isn't in production yet; we hope that'll happen in the next couple of months.


On Monday, August 17, 2015 at 11:17:18 AM UTC-4, Yuriy Nakonechnyy wrote:

I think one issue is that Google builds their apps from GWT master branch. They don't need release versions. That also means that the master branch is stable and its fine to use it in production.

The company I work for does the same. We have some custom GWT patches and build or own GWT every one or two month based on the master branch. We don't really had any problems with that approach.

Yes, this seems fine for smaller changes like bug fixes/minor changes but how about major changes like update of JDT and support of Java 8? Did this occur overnight and if it occurred overnight how confident GWT developers are in such changes? In my opinion, in such cases it would be good to hear a word from GWT developers (or steering commitee - sorry I'm not well aware of the organization behind GWT) regarding stability of certain releases because they are more aware of that, rather than community.

 

Some days ago in IRC and proposed that GWT should do regular releases from the CI server that do not have "-SNAPSHOT" in their names and have a slightly different version number, e.g. <major for breaking changes>.<timestamp>. These CI releases could probably also be done after Google had tested the build against all their internal apps. 

That way a new release can be done every one or two month and the enterprise guys are happy because no "-SNAPSHOT" dependency is in their build file. Maybe that is an acceptable compromise between using SNAPSHOT builds vs. a released version. At least it would more closely match how Google works and Google is the main committer.

Yes, that would be just perfect in my opinion and keep everyone happy :)

 

Also some days ago Thomas Broyer said that they do a (roughly) monthly steering group meeting but sometimes they don't release meeting minutes because they contain confidential information (from one or more of the companies in the meeting group). I proposed to just remove such information because it is very likely not relevant to the community at all and then regularly release the meeting minutes. 

Maybe they pick up both points in the next steering group meeting.

Hmm, the fact that steering groups meets regularly is really a great news for the community because this means that 1. GWT is not dead and 2. It is actually being driven by steering commitee and not arbitrarily by community (because I started to feel that Google abandoned it and it is developed by separate enthusiasts). Maybe I missed something but since March this year the only online resource with regular updates regarding GWT I found was http://gwtdaily.com/. So in my opinion good automation of the release process is good, but there anyway should be some social human-driven part in it, so that community could have a look at it and have a general perception on how the project is going. And in my opinion, not only the community should provide this social part but rather it should be provided by the team behind GWT in form of some minor regular updates e.g. like news section on the website or e.g. Twitter. In this way community could later refer to original website's news in their blogs which is very good. I guess any news updates are better than no updates so if nothing important or interesting happened during meeting - then it's sufficient to just write that the meeting took place - this fact of meeting itself is very important, IMO. The same goes for commits / minor version updates - even if they are minor, the fact of their regular presence is very essential to the community. Without them, in today's hipster world everyone got used to frequent updates (think Twitter, daily news, daily Facebook posts etc) so if there are no human-written status update for some period of time, people start to turn to competitors :)

 

-- J.

Thanks a lot for the heads up, Jens - this is really appreciated and sheds a lot of light on the fact that GWT is not dead :)

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