GWT 1.6! Has it been that long...?

Google had some rather sizable announcements yesterday afternoon - the launch of GWT 1.6, Java support for App Engine, and an Eclipse plug-in for better integration with these two products.

App Engine had been a small pain to develop in all of its Python-y goodness, but is a fantastic platform in theory, and will definitely yield a result after jiggling enough bugs off of the farm. It's good to see the chains coming off, and it will be fun to watch it continue to evolve.

More important (to me, at least!), GWT 1.6 boasts performance benefits (parallel compilation is wicked fast on multicore boxes ... just pass the compiler the -localWorkers flag and you no longer have to wait 8 minutes for your app to build!), slicker Widgets, and a nifty new Event handling model. Do watch out - if suddenly your events aren't being fired after an upgrade, make sure if you've overriden the onBrowserEvent method you invoke super.onBrowserEvent(...) - that's where the default Event handling happens! The WAR-based implementation is probably cool, but I haven't taken advantage of it at all (RESTlet is my friend), so let me know what you all come across!

For more details, check out their blog.

...and now, back to your regularly-scheduled life...