Ajax Girl

GWT 1.2 has been officially released.

The last important bugs have been squashed from the RC that was out there recently.

Features

• Dynamic, reusable UI components
  Create a Widget by compositing other Widgets. Lay out Widgets automatically in Panels. Send your Widget to other developers in a JAR file.
• Really simple RPC
  To communicate from your web application to your web server, you just need to define serializable Java classes for your request and response. In production, GWT automatically serializes the request and deserializes the response from the server. GWT’s RPC mechanism can even handle polymorphic class hierarchies, and you can throw exceptions across the wire.
• Browser history management
  No, AJAX applications don’t need to break the browser’s back button. GWT lets you make your site more usable by easily adding state to the browser’s back button history.
• Real debugging
  In production, your code is compiled to JavaScript, but at development time it runs in the Java virtual machine. That means when your code performs an action like handling a mouse event, you get full-featured Java debugging, with exceptions and the advanced debugging features of IDEs like Eclipse.
• Browser compatible
  Your GWT applications automatically support IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera with no browser detection or special-casing within your code in most cases.
• JUnit integration
  GWT’s direct integration with JUnit lets you unit test both in a debugger and in a browser…and you can even unit test asynchronous RPCs.
• Internationalization
  Easily create efficient internationalized applications and libraries.
• Interoperability and fine-grained control
  If GWT’s class library doesn’t meet your needs, you can mix handwritten JavaScript in your Java source code using our JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI).

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. We are pretty proud of this particular feature because GWT is now about as “platform independent” as you can get: develop on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X and deploy to IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera on any platform, without any special cases in your code. (If you want a bit more detail about our implementation of Mac OS X support, our release nomenclature and other tidbits, this recent InfoQ interview may interest you.)

We also have already talked about how much faster the 1.2 hosted mode debugging environment is. And it is. If you’ve ever found yourself dropping to the command line using only the GWT compiler because hosted mode was too slow, you really should check out 1.2. Refreshes in hosted mode are almost instantaneous, and hosted mode lets you actually debug your code.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-web-toolkit-12-released-2