On Saturday, July 2, 2016 at 12:29:32 PM UTC+2, Gilberto wrote: > > ... and that's a problem, at least the way it is developed now. > > GWT is a more-or-less open-source project. While it is indeed open-source > (you can look at the code), the process of developing it depends heavily on > closed-source, blackbox projects made by Google, that nobody really knows > about or aren't allowed to say about. > > For example: it was said that "Google uses GWT 2.8 beta internally, so it > is pretty stable". Which projects? Who are the folks involved in those > projects? How deep in the usage of GWT on those projects? Nobody knows, and > yet the development cycle of GWT is tied to it. >
That's not true. Google mirrors GWT code internally so "their GWT" is pretty close to "our GWT" (AFAIK there's one single commit that differs, the one that upgrades Jetty and HTMLUnit) Google uses a "monorepo", where everything is in a single source repository, including GWT. This means there's no "release", every dependency is a "snapshot"; so Google does not use "2.8 beta", it uses "master" (at the point they synchronized with the open-source repo, modulo internal changes, like the commit I mentioned above that they didn't sync internally –if you want the details, that's because they can't depend on Servlet API 3.1, so they have to keep the older Jetty–, and they also already deleted legacy devmode). What we do not know for sure is what parts of GWT they're using and which ones they're not. We know they're using widgets and GWT-RPC, because Google Groups, the very webapp I'm typing this message in, is built with GWT and uses widgets and GWT-RPC (other GWT-based webapps, such as Google Flights, also use widgets BTW). And we know they don't use Request Factory, the Editor Framework, or JSR 303 Bean Validation. We also know they don't use com.google.gwt.dev.DevMode to run their apps, their only dependency on Jetty (for example) is the "internal" use in JUnitShell and CodeServer, but they're not using it to run webapps: they don't rely on web.xml, webapp classloader specific behavior, JSPs, etc. Rather, they (apparently) use CodeServer and run their webapps separately. > So GWT is not only internal to Google since the creation of the steering > group, but still it depends heavily on Google - and it is not advertised as > it used to be (like on Google I/O and other presentations). > > And by being tied to blackbox projects from Google, and since the policy > of Google for release dates is "release when it's done", we, members of the > GWT community outside Google, stay with little-to-no information about how > and when the things will be done. > As said above, Google doesn't really care about "releases", except for that they care enough about the community "outside" who, they know, do care about releases. It's not much "the policy of Google" than "the policy of the GWT Steering Committee", and because Google are the ones doing the heavy development work (though non-Googlers deserve recognition for their hard work, mostly recently for emulating new Java 8 APIs), it happens that we're all waiting for them; but anyone can step in and get involved to help speed the process (if only by testing snapshots, and not only new features but also ensuring there's no regression). I've said it many times, but apparently it bears repeating: complaining doesn't help, it only spreads FUD. Development is made publicly, so if you want to know what's happening, start by having a look at the issue tracker and commit history, then possibly code reviews to see what's coming, and test snapshots (if only for non-regression). And anyone is free to transform this form of communication into another one (posts to the forums, blog articles, etc.) But it takes time, and most of the contributors prefer spending their time differently (contributing code, triaging issues, answering on the forums and stack overflow, trying the new features and give feedback, working on build-tools integrations/plugins, etc.) -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
