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.
• GWT PHP Framework
  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.
• Cypal Studio 1.0 Released
  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.
• Release Candidate now available: the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit
  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.

Well, it’s finally here! It’s been more than five months since it was first announced, but today is the day we can finally get our hands on the final release of GWT 1.5. Congrats to the GWT team and the whole GWT community for making this release happen.

Since GWT manager, Bruce Johnson can do a much better job explaining all the new features of this release than I can, go check out the Google Web Toolkit Blog for the official announcement. For those others who can’t wait, here’s the official download link.

Now that the final release of GWT 1.5 is here, what do you want to see in the next version?

• SmartGWT : GWT API’s for SmartClient
  Sanjiv is back and now he’s working on SmartGWT, a port of the SmartClient library. Hopefully we’ll see some code over the next couple of months. Check out the SmartClient developers blog as well for additional details.
• First glimpse at the new BPM console
  It’s great that JBoss seems to be embracing GWT and is starting to use it with a lot of their products.
• Developing Web 2.0 Apps with the Google Web Toolkit, Part Two
  In the second part of his series, GWT team member Sumit Chandel has written a comprehensive tutorial on GWT server communication.
• Cypal Studio For GWT RC9 Released
  This new build has a couple of bug fixes and enhancements.