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Sanjiv Jivan

I am pleased to announce that GWT-Ext 2.0 has finally arrived. This release of GWT-Ext is a new and significantly improved major release that is based on Ext 2.0.

Demo : http://www.gwt-ext.com/demo

Project Site : http://www.gwt-ext.com/

Download: http://code.google.com/p/gwt-ext/downloads/list

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Overview of changes
  • Performance
    The overall perfomance and responsiveness has been significantly improved in this release. All components / widgets support lazy rendering which means that they can be instantiated and managed without any overhead and their rendering is deferred to the point at which they are required to be attached to the DOM.
  • Unified Component model
    All widgets now follow a consistent hierarchy and are subclasses of a base Component class which manages the creation, rendering and destruction lifecycle operations. Methods common to all Components are now easily accessible in a consistent, intuitive and easy to use manner. Containers, which also extends the Component class, can contain other child components which can be one of the many available widgets or another child Container. Containers only know about the child Components that are added to them, and their layout responsibilities are delegated to the assigned LayoutManager. The Panel class is a subclass of Container and is typically the class users will work with. The Panel class adds a lot of useful features like header, top toolbar, bottom toolbar, and ability to collapse and expand.
  • Improved Layout management
    Building complex layouts in earlier versions was a little cumbersome but it is now a thing of the past. This version has an architecture that separates the responsibility of Containers, which are only aware of child Components, and the layout of the Components within the Container which is handled by an assigned LayoutManager. There are several powerful yet easy to use layouts available like BorderLayout, AccordionLayout, VerticalLayout, HorizontalLayout, AnchorLayout, TableLayout and others that make building complex layouts quite trivial. The Showcase demo has examples of variouos layouts in action.
  • Bean friendly API's and better support for extension
    Separate config classes associated with a widget are no longer required. All Components support a default / no-op constructor and getters and setter for various properties. Various Components do have additional relevant convenience constructors that are frequently used during development like assigning a label and an action listener to a Button. In this version users can now extend any Component, add members and methods and it will be passed by reference when accessed through a callback or a lookup. In short, things work as expected in a typical Java environment.
Features

Many features of the library are illustrated in the Showcase demo. The Showcase demo is bundled with the distribution and can also be accessed online from the project page.

  • Grid
    The performance has been significantly improved in this release and the Grid component can render a large number of rows very fast. The GridPanel now supports Single Level Row Grouping, Grouping of Summary Rows, List box look, drag and drop capabilities, checkbox and row numbered column, context menus and a lot more features. Support for Grid to Tree drag and drop has also been added.
  • Tree
    The TreePanel component supports Checkbox nodes, Drag n Drop between trees and from a grid to a tree, sorting, filtering multi select and many other features. It also handles display of large number of nodes efficiently.
  • Forms
    Forms have been improved significantly allowing users ultimate flexibility in adding and arranging Fields and other Components. For example multiple fields on a single row, fields displayed across tabs, Grids or even Images in a form and other configurations that were previously not easy to setup.
  • TabPanels
    TabPanel's now support scrollable tabs (like Firefox) and context menu's. They support deferred tab rendering so that a tab's content is rendered only when the user selects the tab. Adding IFrames to tabs is also supported.
  • DataView
    DataView is a powerful class that allows you to specify a template for rendering an given Record. You can then bind the DataView to a Store and it will render the Records using the specified HTML template. It not only renders the content but is also backed by a rich event model which allows you to have full control over user actions like click, context menu, double click etc. The main page of the Showcase demo uses a DataView to display the thumbnail images of the samples.
  • Windows
    A Window is a specialized Panel that supports floating, dragging, minimize/maximize/restore. Any other Container or Component can be added to a Window as illustrated by various examples in the Showcase demo.
New Widgets
  • Accordion
    An Accordion is simply a Container that is assigned an AccordionLayout. All child Panel's added to it will be laid out in the form of an Accordion. And since any Contaienr can be added to a Window, creating a floatable Accordion is a breeze.
  • ProgressBar
    Highly configurable ProgressBar and support for custom styling.
  • Tooltips
    Powerful and easy to use Tooltips that can be applied to any Component. Also supports loading remote tooltip content using Ajax.
  • CycleButton
    This is a specialized Menu Button that contains a menu of CheckItem's. The button automatically cycles through each menu item when clicked.
  • TimeField
    A field that has a dropdown with a time picker.
  • Hidden Field
    Ability to add a hidden input field to a Form.
  • Several other goodies
GWT-Plus compatibility
  • GWT-Plus is fully compatible with GWT-Ext 2.0.

Sanjiv,thanks for your great job !