Version 1.3 of the Google Web Toolkit has been released, and it’s completely open source. While that may not seem remarkable in and of itself, it’s part of a bigger plan: “To radically improve the web experience for users . . .”
Of course, after all this buildup, Google’s Tech Lead on the project asks, “So, what’s new in this 1.3 RC?” and answers, “Well, nothing, actually.” Bruce Johnson may be understating the case by a bit, however, and he continues, “The only thing that has intentionally changed since GWT 1.2 is the open source thing.”
Johnson then explained his reasoning. “[S]ince we did have to tweak a lot of source code and the GWT build scripts to make it easy for anyone to compile, we want to be conservative and call this a Release Candidate anyway. Once we hear enough success stories with the 1.3 RC, we’ll call it 1.3 Final then get back to full-speed-ahead coding as we drive toward a nice big GWT 1.4.”
It’s worth noting that the Google Web Toolkit announcement came soon after Google joined the Eclipse Foundation – it seems that the search engine company is getting into all sorts of open source stuff these days. No one seems to mind, though. In the first comment to follow the Slashdot article, Clifton Grifton wrote, “It’s nice to see Google sharing some of the tools they use because let’s face it . . . Google’s web apps (in particular gmail) are very impressive.”
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Doug is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest eBusiness news.
