GWT Application up grade from 1.4 to 2.0

Question

I have an Application written in GWT 1.4.6 Is it feasible to up grade it to GWT 2.0? Where can i found the older versions of GWT i.e. 1.5, 1.6. Do i need to up grade version by version or can i straight away up grade to 2.0??

Answer 1

You can go strait to 2.0. It's back compatible and your code will probably work without changes. 2.0 is a great leap forward with many improvements. If not otherwise you can use the new 2.0 plugin for development but deliver in 1.4. We are doing this for a 1.6 application without code changes.

PS: If you have the time and energy it is recommended to rewrite from the old *Listener to the new *Handler style.

Answer 2

My suggestion is also to go straight to 2.0. You will probably get a lot of deprecated messages, but that won't stop the code, and you can start step by step removing the deprecated, which is recommended, because it's not guaranteed deprecated methods will be supported in future versions. Which would mean more effort later on.

One important item that needs to be addressed when upgrading: In GWT 1.7 Internet Explorer 8 support was added. This means if you have any user.agent properties set in your gwt.xml files, because you have created custom generators you need to add the ie8 user agent next to ie6. Very likely you won't have to make any changes, but make sure to check. Syntax would be as follows:

<any>
  <when-property-is name="user.agent" value="ie6" />
  <when-property-is name="user.agent" value="ie8" />
</any>

Leaving this out might mean you don't have correct ie8 support, because in such a case GWT generates the ie8 permutation with the default implementation and not the ie6, which might be the one you want. Also check any third party libraries you have used and make sure you update to version supporting GWT 1.7 at minimal. If you have third party libraries it could mean they have made changes and that the newer version of the library is not compatible with the version you are currently using.