There's much to be happy about for Java web developers this morning. Google has announced support for Java on AppEngine. Early access is being granted on a FIFO basis, however you can download the SDK now. But wait, there's more! This SDK includes the long-awaited Eclipse plugin for GWT! Read all about it on the GWT blog.
That's made my day.
I came across this video last week. It's a presentation by Bruce Johnson, Technical Lead for the Google Web Toolkit on developing GWT applications with the Eclipse IDE. The first part of the presentation covers some basic introduction to GWT, followed by a little more detail on the inner workings of JSNI and hosted mode. The part I found most interesting was Bruce's discussion of the Eclipse plugin for GWT that Google has been working on internally but has not, as of yet, released to the general developer population. Some Q&A finishes out the session, as usual.
We've seen teasers about the plugin before on the GWT forums on Google Groups and some of the Eclipse project configuration files in SVN contain references to a "gwtNature" in a com.google package. This presentation went a tantalizing step further and included actual demonstration of the plugin's JSNI syntax highlighting and refactoring abilities, among other things. I wish we could get our hands on an early release version of the plugin, even an alpha or pre-alpha quality, just to try it out. So far, I haven't seen any firm commitment to a release date.
Several other informative presentations on GWT were given at Google I/O back in May. The GWT sessions are listed in the "APIs & Tools" track. The live sessions were a pleasure to attend and I highly recommend the videos, which I've referred back to on occasion since.
