Google announces updates to its Google Web Toolkit, Google Plugin for Eclipse, and Google App Engine software development kit (SDK).
Google has
updated some of its core tools for developers, including Google Web Toolkit and
Google Plugin for Eclipse, and added new APIs for Google App Engine.
In a
Feb. 14 blog post, Chris Ramsdale of the Google
Developer Tools team said GPE (
Google Plugin for Eclipse) and
GWT 2.2
(Google Web Toolkit 2.2) are now available with several new features. Google
Plugin for Eclipse 2.2 directly integrates
GWT Designer, a WYSIWYG Ajax user-interface
designer that makes it much easier to quickly build UIs.
In addition,
Ramsdale said developers can take advantage of the modern Web with the first
round of HTML5 support within the GWT software development kit. Also, GWT's
CellTable widget now offers new functionality,
such as default column sorting and the ability to set column widths. These new
features make it even easier to build best-in-breed Web applications using
Java-based tools and Eclipse, Ramsdale said. And while these applications can
be run on any platform, Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it very easy to deploy,
and run, on
Google App Engine.
"Directly
integrating GWT Designer into the Google Plugin for Eclipse has been a top
priority for us over the past few months," Ramsdale said. "We've had some very
positive feedback from the community early on,
and for this release, we not only wanted to provide the best developer
experience when using GWT Designer, we also wanted a seamless experience across
GWT Designer and GPE."
Moreover, GWT
2.2 includes support for HTML5-specific features, such as the
Canvas element, which allows for dynamic,
scriptable rendering of 2-D shapes and bitmap images, and the embedding of
Audio/Video tags. "These APIs are still experimental and may change a bit over
the next couple of releases, but we feel that they're stable enough to deserve
some real mileage (by you)," Ramsdale said.
Meanwhile,
regarding Java 1.5, Ramsdale said, "GWT version 2.2 will only have deprecated
support for Java 1.5, resulting in warnings when building applications. While
Java 1.5 will still work for this release of GWT, developers should upgrade
their version of Java to correct these warnings and ensure compatibility with
future versions of GWT."
On Feb. 11,
Google announced an update to its App Engine SDK,
version
1.4.2, which focuses on improving and updating a few existing App
Engine APIs. One update is an improved
XMPP API to help applications better interact
with users. Notifications are sent when users sign in and out and when their
status changes, and the application can now set presence details to be returned
to the user. Subscription and Presence notifications are enabled as inbound
services in the application configuration.
Google also
delivered Task Queue performance and
Task Queue API improvements.
According to a
Feb. 11 post by the App Engine Team, "First,
we've increased the maximum rate at which tasks can be processed to 100
tasks/second. Applications can also specify the maximum number of concurrent
requests allowed per queue in their
queue's configuration file. This can help you
more easily manage how many resources your task queue is consuming. We've also
added an API that allows you to programmatically delete tasks, instead of
managing this manually from the Admin Console."
Google also
made other minor tweaks to the App Engine platform and updated the
App Engine Roadmap with a few new projects, the
team said.
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