Errai and GWT: State of the Union

If you've seen our recent blog posts, you know that work on Errai 3 is progressing quickly with even more additions to our declarative programming model, performance improvements and a number of simplifications that aim to make getting started a lot easier. All details can be found in our roadmap. Please take a few minutes to review our plan. We're always looking for feedback. At Red Hat we innovate together with our open source communities and we rely on your input and collaboration!

As you know, Errai is based on GWT which itself is a healthy open source project with a large and active community. GWT is a fantastic technology that not only boosts developer productivity, especially in complex browser-based applications, its extensibility also allows for building frameworks like Errai on top of it. Since 2006 I have been using GWT successfully in a number of different projects and I am happy to announce that I got the opportunity to join the GWT Steering Committee. I am honored to represent Red Hat and continue the work that Mike Brock has led in regards to Errai and GWT. I look forward to contributing to one of the best ecosystems in the Java open source landscape.

Red Hat's investment in GWT is not only based on Errai but also on a number of customer facing applications as well as new project called UberFire, a web-based workbench framework implemented with GWT and Errai, led by Jonathan Fuerth.

Errai will also be represented at the GWT.create conference, the biggest GWT community event happening in San Francisco and Frankfurt this December. Jonathan and myself will be presenting in San Francisco, Erik Jan de Wit in Frankfurt. We hope to meet many of you at these events and discuss the future of Errai and GWT or engage in other technology debates :).

GWT and Errai are both mature technologies with a bright future ahead!

We hope to meet many of you at these eventsWe

We hope to meet many of you at these events

New Development Mode Setup in Errai 3.0 Milestone 2

One of the new features in our latest 3.0 release is a new development mode setup using JBoss 7 (or Wildfly 8). Until this point, our demos have either:

1. used an embedded Jetty server, or
2. have required you to manually run your own JBoss AS instance.

But both of these setups have drawbacks. Having an embedded server makes the development process much more convenient, but it is often necessary to develop with an enterprise capable application server.

The newest development mode setup brings us one step closer to having our cake and eating it too. Using the JBoss CLI interface, we now control an external JBoss or Wildfly instance with the GWT-Maven plugin.

The Setup

All it takes to get started is two new Errai dependencies and some minor changes to the gwt-maven-plugin configurations.

The Workflow

Want to run your app in development mode? Just run mvn gwt:run .

Need to update the server-side code? Run mvn compile and then press "Restart Server".

How Can I Get In On This?

You can check out this feature on errai-tutorial. In our new tutorial guide you can get a thorough introduction on how to setup your environment to run and develop with Errai. (But you can skip to here to get straight to the development mode instructions).

But What If I'm Still On Errai 2.4.x?

Don't worry, you're invited too! The two new dependencies (errai-cdi-jboss and errai-client-local-class-hider) have no other Errai dependencies themselves. That means you can add these artifacts to your maven project without any conflicts. Just add the following to your pom:
And make sure that your gwt-maven-plugin configuration is consistent with the following (specifically the extraJvmArgs, noServer, server properties):
Hope you enjoy it.

Milestone 2 of Errai 3.0 and Errai 2.4.2.Final released!

We've just released the second milestone of Errai 3.0 with a long list of fixes and enhancements. The exact version number is 3.0.0.20131101-M2. The high level roadmap for Errai 3 can be found here. We're always looking for feedback! What features/improvements would you like to see and what is most important to you and your applications? Feel free to leave a comment on this blog, create a forum post or file a JIRA for us.

Watch this space for a follow up post by Max Barkley showing the new development mode support for JBoss AS 7 or WildFly 8 in Errai 3. This will greatly simplify the getting started experience and allow you to develop and test an Errai/GWT application in your actual runtime container.

Errai 2.4.2.Final was also just released and contains a small number of fixes. Most importantly it makes sure applications built with Errai 2.4 can be deployed to WildFly 8.0.0.Beta1.

Happy coding!