Release: gwt-validation 2.1 snapshot released!

I just wanted to let everyone out there in JSR-303 land know that we're not dead.  I work full-time, most weeks, as a Java consultant and don't always have time to get to this pet project.

However I wanted to let people know that we're on the road to 2.1 and that there have been some exciting changes.

First and foremost, the Java/reflective JSR-303 validation implementation no longer requires that Reflections do its scanning magic.  This is a huge improvement and will let us go forward into containerized environments that were previously closed off.  This includes some versions of Tomcat, JBoss, and Google's own App Engine.

Secondly, serialization has been addressed.  It has a long way to go but the basic serialization support is in there.  It mainly only works from server -> client however.  A lot of the things that GWT does to optimize serialization actively hinder this effort.  The steps made for 2.1 are just one of many that will need to be complete for this to be a fully working feature.

As a minor change, the project has been slightly rearranged.  There is now a parent pom, a core (gwt-validation), the compatibility tests, and the sample.  Most importantly to most people the gwt-validation-sample has been updated to work fully with Maven and should be much more straightforward to examine and run.

Finally, some work has been done on allowing the user to specify model classes.  This is not yet implemented as of r324 (the newest SVN revision as of this writing) but it is probably the last feature that will make it into version 2.1.  After that, we're just going to be looking at, maybe, a month of stabilization.

Actually, I'll go ahead and say it, we'll be releasing gwt-validation 2.1 on May 14th.  We're trying to get better at release engineering and time lines so we'll also be addressing that in future postings and discussions as well.

Thanks for sticking with the project, however small, over the years.  (Years, really?)

Happy validating.