Re: Is this project active?

@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

 

On Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 2:58:47 AM UTC-4, carl.hos...@gmail.com wrote:

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

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GWT Users" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to google-web-toolkit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-web-toolkit/3518dbba-f625-4333-93ae-d5942741c9b3%40googlegroups.com.