Monday, December 31, 2007

GWT Widget Library Close to a 0.1.6 Release

There has been a lot of work going in to the GWT Widget Library lately, and I wanted to provide a preview of what it will include.

New Canvas widget

George Georgovassilis added a Canvas widget to the library that uses VML on Internet Explorer and the canvas tag on Firefox, Opera, and Safari. After the launch of the initial implementation you can expect to see incremental enhancements down the road.

Calendar Widgets

The existing CalendarPanel has had some performance improvements including one that can cut the rendering time in half. In addition to this there is a new SimpleCalendar widget that builds on the CalendarPanel by providing controls for navigating. The SimpleCalendar is accompanied by several stylesheets to make it easy to use out of the box.

Depending on the timing you may also see the addition of an EventCalendar. The EventCalendar widget will display one or more calenders with a list of events below the calendars. A single set of controls will be provided to advance the series of calenders. So for example you may display three calendars to represent the quarter, then be able to navigate forward and back full quarters.

HTMLInclude Widget

You can think of the HTMLInclude widget as the core HTML widget with one small difference, you supply the URL of the content instead of in-lining the content in your application. The benefit is that your code is no longer cluttered with long strings of HTML content, and you can change the content without needing to recompile your application.

Beyond this there has been a reasonable amount of house cleaning and bug fixing, including providing an updated Maven 2 POM file to make it easy to download and compile the library from the source.

There is no schedule, but I hope to have this released no later than the end of January. If you interested in a sneak peak please feel free to download and build from the source, the trunk is always kept in a fairly stable condition.


Library Home Page

Subversion Repository

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Robert,

Great news about GWT-Widgets 0.1.6!

Please include the patches I've made (small patches, to be sure), and placed on the gwt-widgets sourceforge site. (Patches to the lightbox component under the name moore234.)

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=169692&atid=851376

Dan

Robert Hanson said...

Thanks for pointing these out and for submitting the patches. I will check them out over the weekend and get them added.

eggsy84 said...

Hi Robert,

In GWT WL have you fixed an issue (Think its more of a Javascript/Scriptaculous one though) in which some of the Effects don't work on IE. A few of us have been discussing that on the GWT forums.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thread/thread/c9129e1226968e97

Is this something you have come across?

Robert Hanson said...

Eggsy, thanks for the heads up. It looks like this is a Prototype issue, so I guess there isn't much I can do.