Today we are happy to announce the availability of Ext GWT 3.0 Beta!
We consider this Ext GWT 3.0 Beta to be feature complete (with one exception, the tri-state tree). Moving forward we will focus solely on fixing bugs that we find and that the community reports. In the time since Developer Preview 5, the team has been hard at work finishing the new 3.0 features and working to fix bugs that have been reported by the community. We’re excited in Ext GWT 3.0 to include the following major features:
- Adoption of GWT Events and Handlers
- First class support and interoperability with GWT Widgets
- Interface based design (supports easier testing and the MVP pattern)
- Improved model support (POJO based)
- Compile time templates
- Cells, including support for cells in data widgets
- Cell based fields
- New and improved strongly typed layout engine
- Full UiBinder support
- New native Draw and Charting API (no plugins!)
- Custom theming based on Appearance pattern and ClientBundle
For a list of changes in 3.0 Beta, please refer to the release notes.
The improvements in Ext GWT 3.0 allow you to take advantage of new functionality with a minimal learning curve. Also, the addition of the new plugin free charting components enable you to extend your applications with powerful data visualization and analytics capabilities, all without needing brower plugins. The new charting components leverage SVG and VML giving developers compatibility across all desktop browsers. And because v2 and v3 can coexist in the same applications (stay tuned for detailed instructions in a upcoming blog post), you can plan for an orderly upgrade that fits your development cycle.
Special promotion through the end of 2011
We’re also offering a discounted special for the Ext GWT 2.x commercial bundle. From now until the end of the year, if you purchase an Ext GWT 2.x bundle, you’ll receive a 20% discount off the current price and receive Ext GWT 3.0 GA when it’s available at no additional cost! This special is available until the end of 2011, so take advantage of it now to lock in savings.
You can take advantage of this offer immediately at the Sencha store.
Additionally, we are pre-announcing updated Ext GWT 3.0 commercial pricing that will take effect after the release of Ext GWT 3.0 GA in the early half of 2012. Of course, Ext GWT 3.0 will continue to be available under the GPLv3 license, giving you the flexibility to choose the license that works best for your scenario.
Maven
The final release of 3.0 will be put into Maven central and no extra repository is required. However, the releases before GA are released as snapshot releases.
To get the snapshot releases, you will need to add the following repository section to your pom.xml:
<repository> <id>sonatype-snapshots</id> <name>Sonatype Snapshots</name> <url>https://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots/</url> <snapshots> <enabled>true</enabled> </snapshots> </repository>
We have several artifacts available:
- gxt-release – A zip of the release, similar to how Ext GWT was released before 3.0
- gxt – The core component and data classes
- gxt-charts – The new drawing and charting API
- gxt-legacy – Classes to ease porting projects from earlier Ext GWT versions
- uibinder-bridge – Optional support to allow complete configuring non Widget types using in UiBinder XML. Will not be required when Google releases 2.5
In PR5, you indicated you would also add grid column reordering, but I notice it has not been implemented and is not listed as an exception alongside the tri-state tree. Are there no longer plans to support this in the ExtGWT grid?
Other than that, it looks great!
@austin – We will be supporting column reordering in 3.0. It is about complete and will be included in the next beta release.
Why not just call it GXT 3?
Trying to say “there’s this cool library called ee ex tee gee double-you tee three” is a hell of a mouthful. It’s called GXT all in the source already anyway. What’s the deal with this? Also, it’s impossible to find resources by googling “ext gwt grid issue” because I just get GWT results.
Just call it GXT already! Everyone already does except for Sencha. Frustrating.
Indeed great news. I was waiting for beta and hope it could be used in production.
From the response to the first question, it is not clear if the tri-state tree is stil on the 3.0 roadmap?
What about new Neptune UI theme? Do you plan to incorporate it into final Ext GWT 3.0 release?
Gr8 news. Thank you.
Ouch. com.sencha.gxt.widget.core.client.form.ValueBaseField.setPropertEditor()
Is it a bug and should be setPropertYEditor()?
@austin – column reordering is now complete and in SVN. You can see the change here http://staging.sencha.com:8080/examples-dev/#ExamplePlace:basicgrid.
@travis – Ext GWT is the official name of the product. Pronouncing as “X-Gwit” is a little easier than “E-X-T-G-W-T”.
@deepak – tri-state tree is still on the 3.0 roadmap and is being worked on now.
@robert – Neptune support will most likely be added in 3.1.
@viacheslav – Nice catch. We have filed ticket and this will be fixed for the next release.
What about backwards compatibility? How “smooth” do you expect upgrades to be?
Any comments or test data on the expected performance of 3.0? Especially with large trees and grids.
@jeff
I’ve recently updated my system partly to 3.0. Without JSNI it works smoother. With simple binding GWT RequestFactory and GWT Editor support it actually rocks. There are of course some bugs in the code, but it didn’t stop me to run production.
Fine job guys. Almost fixes all my current bugs. I was able to remove a bunch of workarounds. Also the Field.getValue() is fixed? (When T was of type X with field name and id it would always return the string representation).
@Darrel: Thanks for the quickness/updates!
I cannot get the UiBinder support working with GWT Designer. Will this be corrected before release? I noticed complaints about this when you first released UiBinder support in a preview release too.
I also cannot seem to get UiBinder working with Grid and notice there are no examples for doing this. Is support for this planned?
Excellent.
@sblommers There is also bug with ComboBox.getValue(). It returns null, but there is a workaround on the forum.
@Tom There is NO backward compatibility. But GXT 3 and GXT 2 could be used together. So you could REWRITE several parts of system according to the new version approaches and leave other parts working on GXT 2. I saw an example on the forum.
@austin
IMHO GWT Designer support is not high priority issue.
Nevertheless I do love this new version with native GWT architecture.
Oh, great, I need this.
I cannot get the UiBinder support working with GWT Designer. Will this be corrected before release?
@Viacheslav Dobromyslov
GWT Designer is indispensable in working with ExtGWT :) !
I can find bugs right away in the GWT Examples explorer window!! Please dont repeat it! :) We Like you!!
When is the projected final release date planned for EXT GWT 3.0?