Elephantsquared.

Amit Manjhi, a Google Web Toolkit developer announced two days ago the availability of the first milestone build for GWT 2.0. You can download it here but keep in mind that this is an early view, which means lots of bugs and stability issues. According to the announcement, many things are changing in GWT 2 that might otherwise be confusing without explanation. Some of the functionalities that are coming to GWT 2 include:

• In-Browser Development Mode: Prior to 2.0, GWT hosted mode provided a special-purpose “hosted browser” to debug your GWT code. In 2.0, the web page being debugged is viewed within a regular-old browser.
• Code Splitting: Developer-guided code splitting allows you to chunk your GWT code into multiple fragments for faster startup
• Declarative User Interface: GWT’s UiBinder now allows you to create user interfaces mostly declaratively.
• Bundling of resources (ClientBundle): GWT has shipped with ImageBundles since GWT v1.4, giving developers automatic spriting of images.
• Using HtmlUnit for running GWT tests: GWT 2.0 no longer uses SWT or the old mozilla code (on linux) to run GWT tests. Instead, it uses HtmlUnit as the built-in browser.

As always, remember that GWT milestone builds like this are use-at-your-own-risk and we don’t recommend it for production use.

– Amit Manjhi, on behalf of the Google Web Toolkit team

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