gwt-incubator – what’s in it?

gwt-incubator project is basically a gwt playpen area. It has a pretty good wiki with examples and descriptions. I just looked over the incubator trunk and compiled most of the demos and would like to share my summary of the widgets.

1) bulk loading table – basically a high performance HTML table generator based on innerHTML approach. No fancy demos, but here is the screenshot:

2) generator example – an example of a GWT generator. Nothing fancy but educational.

3) DatePicker – a pretty slick GWT calendar widget

4) Dropdown listbox – some kind of a new widget based a some newly prototyped GWT event model (it seems):

5) FastTree – again, another bulk generator this time for trees. Pretty neet and fast:

6) LogginDemo – basically an enhanced version of GWT logger for the browsers.

7) Paging scroll table and Scroll table – sophisticated grid/table widget supporting editing, column resizing, paging etc.

8) Pinned Panel – a neat sliding panel type widget with the panel capable of rolling from a side of the screen:

9) Progress bars – the oft requested GWT feature but for some reason missing from the core GWT:

10) Slider Bar – a powerful and sophisticated GWT slider implementation:

11) Spinners – anything non-visual that can spin, can be spinned :). pretty interesting, IMO:

12) Style injector/Immutable Resource Bundle – injecting CSS into GWT compilation result using annotations, and writing code within CSS to customize for different browsers or what not.

13) YouTube widget (or any Flash object) – embed YouTube videos or whatever other objects using GWT.

Ext GWT releases preview with grids, portal, webdesktop support

A new preview release of Ext GWT (1.1. Alpha 2) is now available for download here and includes a number of long awaited goodies: new grids implementation, portals, webdesktop, new forms etc. For a complete post describing the new features read  here.

It seems Darrell has been making quite a bit of progress lately on GXT – good stuff.

Release Candidate of GWT Google Apis is available

From the announcement

“We’re happy to say that the first Release Candidates for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit <http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis/>are now ready to be taken for a test drive. The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java language bindings and API specific ‘plumbing’ for some Google JavaScript APIs. The goal is to make it easy for developers to use these JavaScript APIs with GWT. Libraries available at this time include a new version of Gears, as well as new libraries for Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API.“

Open Flash Charts for GWT

There is now a wrapper project hosted on Google Code for the Open Flash Charts 2. Open Flash Charts is just what it says is – an open source flash charting library, and quite slick looking I might add. And the GWT wrapper is : “The OFCGWT project provides a simple to use chart widget for GWT based on Open Flash Chart 2. It uses a heavily modified POJO bean model from OFC4J that is serialized using GWT JSON to provide the correct GWT Client data that meets the requirements of the OFC 2.x API. A beta version is available for early developer testing.”

And here is the link to the announcement on the GXT forums and here is a screen shot

a couple of GWT calendar projects – gwt-scheduler and gwtsimiletimeline

I just looked over the list of gwt projects hosted on code.google.com and found a couple of quite interesting calendar projects that were recently updated for GWT 1.5 – gwt-scheduler and gwtsimiletimeline.

gwt-scheduler is a pretty neat GWT-based calendar implementation, with a couple of calendar views (month&week) & simple scheduling ability.

gwtsimiletimeline is a GWT wrapper around MIT’s simile-widets project‘s Timeline widget. The widget is quite stunning in its timeline/calendard visualization abilities using javascript. Simile-Widgets project also has a very cool timeplot widget – hopefully someone would provide a GWT wrapper for it at some point as well.

gwtapps – desktop and messenger examples

I really like the GWT Apps book by Ryan Dewsbury – I’m probably not alone in thinking that it’s the best book out there for any GUI developer looking to familiarize him/herself with GWT and the world of Rich Internet Applications development. The book is choke-full of various basic as well as advanced examples. The two that I personally find very useful are the Desktop (or rather a light-weight GWT portal) example and the high-performance remote event queuing Messenger implementation. The examples and the book are for the latest production release of GWT – 1.4 – but the source code is actually very easily migratable to 1.5 (it was really breeze when I did this for some of my own needs). If you’d like to try it yourself, I found that the source code for all examples in the book is available in files section of GwtApps’ google group.

Ext-GWT (GXT) releases preview of new Grid widget

Darrell from ExtJs just released a preview of the new Grid component that will be part of Ext-GWT (GXT) v.1.1. Here are the previews of various grid views and an implementation of editable grid. More details on the implementation plans for the Grid component are here