This is the first (and hopefully not the last) summary of the newly created GWT Contributors list. The list was only started on Tuesday, so this summary is really for only a half week. I think the size is just about right though, so I expect that going forward I will filter out a little more than I did this week.
The GWT Contributors list officially opened on Tuesday with a welcome message from Joel Webber. Joel explained that they "intend to have (their) discussions about GWT development in this group, so that everyone can participate". He explained that the list would be used as an internals list while the original GWT list will remain a users type list [thread].
Sandy McArthur found a build issue on the Mac (missing tools.jar), while Alex Tkachman found one on Windows (no chmod command). Scott Blum responded with a patch for the first, and had some special instructions for the second [Mac thread, Win thread]. A few days later a Scott Blum readied a patch that changes the way the distributions were packaged [thread].
Alex Tkachman proposed that Composite be modified to allow it to be initialized more than just once. Henry Crutcher indicated that the reason for not allowing reinitialization was to prevent memory leaks in IE6. Discussion ensued as to if this was the right thing to do. So far there is no indication that this will be addressed [thread].
Dan Morrill sent out the "weekly issues summary" on Wednesday. Dan explained that the report is a summary of the bug reports for the last week, grouped by category. In the "Not to miss" category is a compiler bug (or two), a slow ListBox.clear(), a discrepancy with Date.toGMTString() in web vs. hosted mode, an issue with using a JSP as your start page, and a $wnd.confirm() issue. Dan also provides some stats for the general GWT list [thread].
Dan Morrill also posted a fair warning that they subversion commits were going to start hitting the list. Sandy MacArthur asked if the issue tracker updates would also be hitting the list. Dan Peterson chimed in and said that it had been decided to not spam the list with these, potentially obscuring more important information. Sandy was more than happy to be spammed, but it looks like for now they will stick with only Dan Morrill's weekly summary [thread].
Emily Crutcher shared with us a short bio, then provided us with the first public Request for Review (RR). This first RR is an overhaul of the JavaScriptObject class. Emily provided a bullet list of the requirements and a few design alternatives. Scott Blum provided some additional alternatives, and explained that the goal is to make it easier to integrate GWT with external JavaScript libraries, and to allow reusable JavaScript libraries with GWT. So far there is no clear choice, which comes down to a balance between performance, flexibility, and complexity [thread].
That's it for this week. Since this is the first summary posting, please let me know what you think, good or bad. If there is something that you didn't like with the format please provide suggestions for fixing it. I am more likely to take negative criticism seriously if there if it is accompanied by a suggestion.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment