Hey guys, I’m preparing to launch a new GWTSite contest this Monday. There’s going to be lots of cool prizes to be won so make sure you come back on Monday to check it out.

• Gwt-incubator – what’s in it?
  For those of you who haven’t checked out the GWT Incubator in awhile, Tim over at GWT Now has written a post showing some of the various widgets that have been developed so far.
• GWT and OSGi
  Ian Bull has written a nice, short guide on how to setup GWT and OSGi together.
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  If you use any of Fred’s libraries, download the updates so you can use them with GWT 1.5.
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  Learn more about how to make your GWT apps more easily accessible.
• Wicket and GWT compared with code
  Paul Thomas has done a really interesting case study comparing Wicket and GWT.
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  This project makes the Adobe Air API available to your GWT projects via JSNI. It also provides tooling to make GWT + AIR development easier.

Instantiations has just released version 5.1 of GWT Designer, their popular GUI building plugin for GWT. This new version brings GWT 1.5 support and also basic integration with the MyGWT (yes, the old version) and GWT-Ext widget libraries. It is also backward compatible with GWT 1.4.62.

From their press release:

GWT Designer is an Eclipse-based graphical user interface (GUI) creation tool supporting features such as drag-and-drop GUI building and bi-directional code generation, providing several useful wizards that help make GWT development easier. It allows developers to focus on creating and testing rich Internet applications using Eclipse, Java and GWT without worrying about the complexities of AJAX coding. GWT Designer uses wizards, WYSIWYG builders, composites, layouts and controls.

GWT Designer is available on a subscription basis and costs $59 for 1 year, $99 for 2 years or $139 for 3 years with one year of support. Existing GWT Designer subscribers can upgrade to version 5.1 for free. There is also a two-week trial available on their download page.

I haven’t tried the new version yet, but the old version of GWT Designer has worked quite nicely for me. Anyone else want to share their experiences with GWT Designer?

Of course the big news this week was the release of GWT 1.5, but there was a lot of other GWT related news as well.

• Ext GWT 1.1 Alpha 3 released
  It looks like the next version of Ext GWT will include some cool new features. Two of them are called WebDesktop and Portals.
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  I saw this on the forums and it looks like it has a lot of potential. Check out the slick looking demo.
• GWT Generator Experiments – 2
  Alex Moffat continues his excellent series discussing GWT Generators.
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  Now supporting GWT 1.5 and Eclipse 3.4.
• Creating Custom Google Maps Overlays with GWT Widgets
  A useful little tutorial if you do any work with Google Maps and GWT.
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  The Google API Libraries include GWT support for Google Gears, Google Gadgets and the Google Ajax Search API.
• Giving GWT a Spring in its Step
  Although there are other guides out there, David Kuhn has written a nice article on integrating GWT and Spring.