Tuesday, October 27, 2015

GWT Plugin Still Not Ready for Eclipse 4.5?

Eclipse Mars / v4.5 was released June 24, 2015. The Google Plugin for Eclipse 4.5 has not yet been released. If you go to the Google Plugin for Eclipse quickstart page, you can see that it's still showing links for Eclipse 4.4, 4.3 and 4.2 / 3.8.

In essence, if you'd like to use GWT and you want to use the latest Eclipse, there's no officially supported option nearly four months later.

If you do a little searching, you'll find a few threads on the subject, :

A friend tried Eclipse 4.5 and the Google Plugin for Eclipse 4.4 together and hit a NoClassDefFound error for Java2HTMLEntityReader. A quick search found that it was a bug, but that raises further questions about a plugin fork, which looks like it might have been around since 2013. It looks like there's a lot of work underway.

Ultimately, between this and some of the posts about GWT 2.8, this adds to my long-growing sense that GWT is stagnating. It hasn't descended into a terrible state yet by any means. It's quite usable for existing projects. Still, I wouldn't recommended it for a new project, and I'd recommend that people using it on existing projects start thinking about the long-term plan for their projects and consider a plan to move away from GWT at some point and how to manage that transition.

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