Ryan Dewsbury is at again. This time he’s built a multiplayer GWT based Pictionary game called XSketch. If you’ve played GPokr or KDice you’ll notice the resemblence in layout to his previous two games. The gameplay is simple enough. One player gets a word, and the other players try to guess what the word is from the drawing. If a player guesses right, both the player and sketcher get points. If no one guesses the drawing, then the sketcher loses points. Play continues around the table.

I haven’t actually started playing yet, but just watching the gameplay is actually quite entertaining. Ryan continues to amaze me with his GWT wizardry. All of his games have been featured on Techcrunch and it looks like Michael Arrington is a big fan. I would suggest he write a book… oh wait, he already has.

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, GWT Tatami 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.

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• Rocket GWT 0.48 released
  It looks like this latest release includes a variety of small improvements and bug fixes.
• Minichat Web client
  An embeddable chat client for your website built using GWT and XMPP. No source is available yet, but there are instructions on how to install it on your own website.
• Google API library for GWT (milestone build)
  This library includes support for the AJAX Search, Google Gadgets, Google Gears and Google Maps APIs. With this release, the developers have split each API into its own individual distribution.
• Using OpenID within GWT
  OpenID is an easy way to create a single digital identity across the internet. Aviad Ben Dov has written a nice tutorial on how to use this authentication mechanism in a GWT application.
• Test driven development for GWT UI code with asynchronous RPC
  Rob Van Maris has written a nice post on how to perform GWT UI testing using EasyMock.

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