Thanks everyone for participating! The contest is now over and emails have been sent to the winners. Once all the winners have claimed their prizes, I will announce them in a new post.

Just a quick reminder to you all, but there is only one day left to collect more entries to our Biggest Ever GWT Giveaway Contest. You have a great chance to win some cool prizes like a free developer license of Ext GWT ($289 value), a year subscription of GWT Designer ($59 value), or a print copy of one of the latest GWT books. The contest ends tomorrow, September 30th at 11:59 PM PST.

I’ve looked at some of the entries so far, and people have been using GWT to create some really great web applications. I’m going to be highlighting some of my favorites in future posts, so this is a chance to get some free publicity for any GWT related projects you are working on. There will be 16 winners picked, so don’t miss out!

The Prizes

Developer License of Ext-GWT (5 licenses)
Wow, this is a great prize. For those who haven’t seen it before, Ext GWT is a great library for building really slick looking GWT applications. It’s predecessor, MyGWT was voted the Top GWT library, and Darrell has been adding some great new features for the upcoming 1.1 release.

One year Subscription of GWT Designer (3 licenses)
Instantiations’ GWT Designer is an easy to use GUI creator that makes developing GWT applications easy. The latest version, released last week, now supports GWT 1.5 and has the added capability of working with the MyGWT and GWT Ext widget libraries.

Google Web Toolkit Applications by Ryan Dewsbury (2 copies).
Ryan is an actual GWT guru who’s actually developed three popular GWT applications: GPokr, KDice and XSketch. His book is all about learning the techniques to create practical GWT applications. I learned a lot from this book.

GWT In Practice, by Robert Cooper and Charlie Collins. (3 copies)
GWT in Practice is a book for more intermediate users of GWT and covers many advanced topics. Robert and Charlie are creators of the Gwittir library and if you’re interested in doing any J2EE development with GWT, you’ll definitely want to take a look at this book.

Pro Web 2.0 Application Development with GWT by Jeff Dwyer. (3 copies)
This is the latest GWT book out there and currently the only one that covers GWT 1.5. This is also an intermediate level book and focuses on using GWT to build a live GWT application called ToCollege.net.

How To Enter

The easiest way to participate is to subscribe to the GWT Site RSS feed via email. If you’ve already subscribed, then you are already entered to win and you will also be automatically entered into every other future contest! (1 entry)

Here are the other three ways to enter. Pick from one of the choices below and either leave your response as a comment to this post or write a post on your blog (4 entries). If you write a post, make sure to link back to your post in the comments so I can keep track.

1) For those new to GWT, just download the 1.5 release and take it for a spin. Then let us know what you think of it, good or bad. How does GWT compare to your favorite web framework? Will you keep using it? If not, why?

2) Show us a GWT project you’ve been working on. Whether its something already open to the public or just some hobby project you’ve been working on, this is your chance to give your GWT application a plug. Please include your link.

3) Give a review of your favorite GWT library, tool, book or GWT based application.

There are 16 great prizes to win. If you complete all the tasks, you can get a total of 5 entries into the contest. With so many prizes, your chances of winning are quite good! The contest runs from September 8th (11:59 PM Pacific Time) To September 30th (11:59 PM Pacific Time). All the winners will be picked by Random.org’s list randomizer. Please make sure to enter a valid email, or you won’t be able to win.

As mentioned in the contest post, I selected the winners by entering all the email addresses at http://www.random.org/lists and selecting the top three emails as the winners.

Winners

• John Grantham
• Gopi Prathapineni
• Daniel Boromisa

Congratulations to the winners. I’m sending you guys emails and you’ll need to respond to claim your prize. Thanks to Instantiations for making these subscriptions available for me to give away. For those who didn’t win, try the 14 day free trial of GWT Designer and see if you like it. You’ll definitely learn to appreciate it when doing GWT development.

Recently, Instantiations released version 4.0 of their GWT Designer product. For those who don’t know, GWT Designer is an Eclipse based GUI creation tool for the Google Web Toolkit. It supports such snazzy features as drag-and-drop GUI building, bi-directional code generation, and several useful Wizards that help make GWT development easier. This latest version includes some exciting new features including basic integration with the MyGWT and GWT-Ext widget libraries.

For this contest, I have three, one-year subscriptions (a $39 value) of GWT Designer to give away. If you are already an existing GWT Designer subscriber, you will be able to get your subscription renewed for an extra year if you win.

How to Enter

You can gain entries into the contest in three ways.

1) Subscribe to my RSS feed via email. Existing email subscribers are automatically entered into this and every other future contest! (1 entry)

2) Leave a comment to this post, letting us know something about GWT that you’d like to see added or improved. (2 entries)

3) Download a copy of GWT Designer (if you don’t have it already) and leave a comment on this post, telling us your impressions of the product (good or bad). (2 entries)

If you perform all three tasks, you will give yourself 5 chances to win. Our first contest, had 50 contestants so your chances of winning are pretty good.

Deadline

Contest ends Monday, March 10th at Noon PST. The three winners will be picked by Random.org’s list randomizer. Please make sure to enter a valid email, or you won’t be able to win.

Thanks and good luck!

GWT Designer using the GWT Kitchen Sink example

I have a copy myself and I like it a lot. I use the built in Wizards all the time to quickly create my GWT applications. If you’ve ever used Netbeans’ Matisse for building Swing GUIs, you’ll know how much time a good GUI builder can save you.

So, how do you win? It’s quite simple. Just leave a comment to this post, telling us what your favorite GWT third-party library is. That’s it! Check back in a week, and I will announce the winner from one of the commentors. Hopefully this will be the first of many giveaways so be sure to subscribe to my rss feed to keep yourself updated. Good luck!

Update (1/14/08)

Congratulations to the winner, Mark Chance. Thanks to everyone who participated. There should be chances to win some cool stuff in the future, so don’t miss out.