We’ve had a lot of great entries during the first week of our latest GWT Contest. Make sure to participate to get a chance to win.

• GWT Tatami 1.2 Beta released
  It’s good to see some life out of this project. Among other things, this release now support’s Dojo’s Grid widget.
• New GWT Incubator Drop available
  A new GWT incubator build has been released which now supports GWT 1.5. There’s a ton of cool stuff in here so check it out.
• Get cross-site JSON via HTTP with GWT and the GWT Designer by Instantiations
  This is just one of the tutorials that Chad over at Giant Flying Saucer has written this past week showing how to do various GWT tasks and using GWT Designer.
• GWT Server Library 0.1.5a released
  This is a compatibility and maintenence release.
• GWT Ext 2.0.5 released
  Lots of bug fixes in this latest release.

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.
• gwt-log, gwt-dnd, gwt-voices & Hornet Blast — updates for GWT 1.5 and Chrome
  If you use any of Fred’s libraries, download the updates so you can use them with GWT 1.5.
• Built-in Accessibility in GWT 1.5 Applications
  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.
• GWT-in-the-AIR M1 release
  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?