Removing GWT 1.3 support in Seam 2.0+?

[robjellinghaus]

Hi folks, Shane says in http://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBSEAM-1748 that GWT 1.3 support will be removed in a future version of Seam.

Now that 2.0.0.GA is out, the question arises, what future version would that be? GWT 1.5 is churning along. I finally looked at the GWTService implementation tonight, and I can definitely say that dropping GWT 1.3 support would enable 90% of that code to go away. I personally refactored GWT 1.4's server-side RPC implementation to make it much easier to reuse, but Seam's GWT components don't use any of that because of 1.3 backwards compatibility.

I'd love to work on a Seam patch to shrink those components way down, if dropping 1.3 is OK. I can also pitch in on 1.5 support as it gets closer.

Anyway, please advise :-)
Cheers,
Rob

[gavin.king]

Why 1.5? Can we just target 1.4?

[robjellinghaus]

1.5 supports Java 1.5 syntax, which will make it a lot easier to send Seam components over GWT RPC, which has all kinds of interesting uses. (Mainly, being able to avoid a whole crappy DTO layer just because you want to send some simple little @Entities over the wire.)

I'd like to see a GWT14Service and a GWT15Service in whatever Seam version ships after GWT 1.5. But that's neither here nor there; the main point is GWT 1.3 should be dropped after Seam 2.0.0, and doing so will clean things up a lot.

(I know you guys like to stay one version behind, but c'mon ;-)

Cheers!
Rob

[shane.bryzak]

I would love to drop GWT 1.3 support, as it would mean I can get rid of a bunch of nasty reflection code that is necessary to support it. However I think it's a little too soon to get rid of it yet as some of our users may still be using GWT 1.3 (for whatever reasons).

Perhaps we should aim at supporting just the latest production version, and deprecating support for the previous version. This way we can deprecate 1.3 support immediately, and remove it when 1.5 is released (which if we're lucky will be backwards compatible with 1.4).

[shane.bryzak]

Actually, after checking the code it seems I already deprecated GWT 1.3 support.

[gavin.king]

I don't think we need to continue to support GWT 1.3, given the hacks that were involved in doing that. I don't think that there are a huge number of people using the GWT support yet.

[robjellinghaus]

So Shane, do you want to do the cleaned-up GWTService that drops 1.3 support, or shall I take a shot at it? Might as well do it in CVS...? Or maybe in a separate package or something, just so it's there for when the trigger gets pulled.