The release of Vaadin 6.3.0 is just around the corner. The 6.3 branch has provided nightlies all the time, but at this point I can suggest all projects that are not in production to start using 6.3 builds. We’d appreciate all feedback we get on new features and each regression you can spot.
We’ll build a semi-official “pre-1” release, that some of you may have spotted in trac timeline, in the beginning of next week (when our build master returns to his desk from a short vacation), but changes to nightlies will be minor. We’ll be mostly just fixing bugs until the release.
Major features and where to focus attention:
GWT 2.0, “OOPHM” now default, only one package for all platform, produces faster JS
Form has a method called attachField() that can be overridden to build complex form layouts
Drag and drop features. Tree, Table, and generic helper class DragAndDropWrapper. See Sampler demos in nightly package.
Keyboard shortcuts are now much easier to hook. AbstractField has internal helper that hooks them seamlessly for developer. See Sampler for examples.
Lots of smaller bug fixes and enhancements
So please, if you have a possibility, start using nightlies (or “pre-1” next week) and help us to ensure the best Vaadin release ever.
I’ve got a 6.3 jar (built from SVN), and have configured the eclipse plugin to use it.
I’ve configured the eclipse plugin to use the 6.3 jar - but how can I tell it the pluging to use GWT 2.0.3 as opposed to 1.7? I believe that the wrong version of GWT is being used, leading to the following compilation errors.
Cheers,
Charles.
Starting GWT compiler
Compiling module com.hpdsoftware.vaadin.components.Hpd_vaadin_componentsWidgetset
Refreshing module from source
Validating newly compiled units
Removing units with errors
[ERROR]
Errors in 'jar:file:/C:/workspaces/hpd-vaadin-components/WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/vaadin-6.3.0.dev-20100330.jar!/com/vaadin/terminal/gwt/client/ui/VScrollTable.java'
[ERROR]
Line 33: The import com.google.gwt.dom.client.Style.Visibility cannot be resolved
[ERROR]
Line 2577: The method getChild(int) is undefined for the type Element
[ERROR]
Line 2581: Visibility cannot be resolved
When you are updating the Vaadin version in the project the plugin (provided you are using 1.2.0 or newer) should automatically download and update the used GWT version to 2.0.3 also. The errors indeed suggest you are still using GWT 1.7. Check your project build path. At least if you have made some changes to that yourself (e.g. you have used the OOPHM GWT) you will need to update the build path manually also. In the “libraries” section of the build path configuration you should have the following two rows for GWT:
(FWIW - I hadn’t configured the plugin to use 6.3 nightly - I’d simply checked out the code from SVN, built it, and replaced my 6.2 jar with the dev 6.3 jar, then changed the plugin. )
We didn’t concentrate on performance improvements for this release. It was the GWT team that has made some magic in update to 2.0. The compiled JS sure is faster, but not that much though. In some responses there may be almost 50 percent improvements in execution times, but more commonly the improvement is between 20-30 percent. Majority of the performance boost was actually already there when 6.2 was compiled with our custom build 1.7.-oophm GWT that was built from GWT trunk.
The server latency is still the most critical in most cases and in sampler we have a lot more samples initially visible which quickly eats the performance gained from GWT upgrade.
So go and congratulate GWT team for this improvement!