Unless you were stuck in a cave this past week, you know about the emergence of Ext GWT and the entire Ext JS GPL licensing debate. We had GWT-Ext’s Sanjiv Jivan weigh in, followed by Ext JS creator Jack Slocum’s heated response. While the whole soap opera is somewhat fascinating, I’m more interested in how these new developments will affect the GWT community’s two most popular widget libraries.

Now that Ext GWT is dual licensed, will people now continue to support it by buying commercial licenses? Ext GWT is certainly a nice library and Darrell deserves to be supported for his work. However it seems like there may be a certain level of mistrust over the license change and there are certainly a subset of people that can’t or won’t go with a commercial solution.

I know Sanjiv remains committed to keeping GWT-Ext under the LGPL and is working hard on resolving potential issues. However, if GWT-Ext remains stuck with Ext JS 2.0.2 (the last LGPL version), will it remain viable as time passes? In one of his arguments, Jack points out that when Firefox 3 and IE 8 come out, it may cause issues for 2.0.2 users. Sanjiv has stated that the library will continue to expand with other features like “Tibco Message Bus, Fusion Charts, Pipes, Extensions, and more”, but will that be enough?

With these changes and uncertainty, will new alternatives appear in the GWT widget library space? Currently, GWT-Ext and Ext-GWT are easily the best looking, and most polished projects we have. There are still projects like GWT Widget Library, and a few others, but in my opinion they are a step down from the first two. It seems like this is a new opportunity for a new library to emerge, perhaps using one of the other major javascript libraries like YUI, JQueryUI or MooTools? Or maybe a new one will be written from scratch like this new GWTLib project or my new ExMyGWTExt library (just kidding).

So what do you think? I’ve stuck a poll down here at the bottom and I’m interested in finding out what the communities’ response will be to the whole situation.