Instantiations announced the release of GWT Designer 1.5. The definitive development tool for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), GWT Designer is a comprehensive product for creating AJAX Web applications using the Java programming language. AJAX is shorthand for asynchronous JavaScript and XML, an increasingly popular means for coding rich Internet applications. GWT Designer is built on WindowBuilder Pro(TM), the company's market-leading Eclipse tool for creating Java graphical user-interface (GUIs) applications for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Macintosh and other operating systems.

"GWT Designer has experienced overwhelming acceptance as the ultimate tool to help build Ajax applications using Java," said Eric Clayberg, senior vice president of product development, Instantiations, Inc. "Building it on our WindowBuilder technology-base ensures that we can quickly innovate GWT Designer as Google's GWT evolves."

Gaining Momentum
Introduced just three months ago, GWT Designer already has thousands of users from nearly 70 countries, many of whom are involved in Google's 6,500 member GWT online developer forum. One of the Eclipse Foundation's newest members, Google announced in December that it made all of GWT available as open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Developers on the Google GWT team have called GWT Designer "a very impressive visual GUI creator" and often show it alongside their own GWT kit as the standard for developing Ajax applications using GWT.

Built on WindowBuilder
Because GWT Designer is based on the award-winning WindowBuilder technology, developers can focus on creating and testing rich Internet applications using Eclipse, Java and GWT without worrying about the complexities of AJAX coding. It provides developers with a rich WYSIWYG GUI construction environment allowing them simply to drag-and-drop composites, layouts and controls, as well as cut and paste code inside their favorite text editor when building user interfaces. In less time, they can develop higher quality applications and test and deploy their Web-based solutions as Ajax applications using the Java-to-JavaScript compiler provided by Google.

New Features
"We've responded quickly to customer feedback on our first version of GWT Designer to make version 1.5 an even a better rich-application development tool," said Clayberg. "We've focused all the new features on improving code quality and increasing developer productivity even more by supporting visual inheritance, development under Linux and helping users create valid GWT Java code."

Linux Support -- In addition to supporting Microsoft Windows development platforms, GWT Designer 1.5 has added support for Linux development platforms.

Supports Google's latest releases - Tracking with the GWT release candidates, this version also supports GWT releases 1.2 and 1.3.

Visual inheritance -- Version 1.5 also supports visual inheritance making it easier to reuse code and visual designs, as well as extract super-classes for reuse. This feature improves code quality and speeds development through reuse of code elements.

Ensure valid GWT Java code -- This version of the product also checks Java code for allowed GWT classes and methods since the GWT Java emulation library only supports a subset of the standard JDK class library. This feature performs an on-the-fly code audit that detects usage of disallowed Java classes and method -- faults that would normally not appear until GWT compilation. By analyzing the Java code earlier in the development process, this feature speeds up its verification and removes the need for developers to fix problems detected by the GWT compiler later in the development process.

Price and Availability
GWT Designer 1.5 is available immediately through an annual subscription of $39 (USD) per seat. Two and three year subscriptions are also offered for $69 and $89 (USD). Current subscription holders of GWT Designer 1.0 can upgrade to the new versions at no cost as part of their annual license. A two-week trial copy is available at http://www.instantiations.com/gwtdesigner/.