Google has just released a release candidate for Google Web Toolkit 1.4 which is an upgrade to the framework for writing AJAX applications in Java. This is the first release which had a major involvement of open source community. It is expected to make the job simple for writing AJAX applications such as Google Maps and Gmail. This time the focus was on improving speed and stability. GWT applications pace could be improved by recompiling it with the 1.4 release candidate.

This release has a number of improvements and features which makes it one of the biggest GWT release. Here are the improvements that have been included:

It has an optimized code which is a lot smaller leading to faster load times

Optimization is expected to bring down the size of startup script by eighty percent

Load time of modules would be further brought down with elimination of HTTP round trips

Now RPC is not tied to Java servlets and one can connect to Java back ends of their choice

Library and widget collection have seen an expansion for adding new functionality to applications

There is a benchmark for comparing code performance

Google Web Toolkit would be demonstrated at Google Developer Day conference. Click here to download it.