[ovirt-devel] Moving forward our frontend stack

[Martin Betak]

Hello oVirt developers!

I have prepared patch [1] that upgrades our frontend stack
to use GWT version 2.6.1 (from previous 2.5.1).

This patch also updates GIN to version 2.1.2 and GWT-P to 1.3.1

Since GWT 2.6 features support for Java 7 it was possible to increment
language levels of all projects stuck at Java 6 (common, compat, searchbackend 
and entire of frontend).

To facilitate emitting bytecode compatible with Java 7 also upgrade of AspectJ was 
necessary. This patch upgrades it to AspectJ 1.8 that features even support for 
Java 8 which will save effort when upgrading to GWT 2.7/3.0 in the future.

Most of the changes in the patch are due to upgrade of GWT-P - i.e. changing 
packages of TokenFormatter and PlaceRequest.

Overall this patch is *MUCH* simpler than the previous http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/16739/
which facilitated upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5.1, and hopefully much less risky.

I have tested draft-compile, debug-mode and also tried to use the resulting application
manually for some time. So far everything worked (surprisingly well!) and I have not
detected any defects. Of course I invite anyone to test this patch on his own since 
it is and upgrade of our core infrastructure.

That having said I think is comparatively simple and the benefits outweigh the risks
if this upgrade is done at the beginning of ovirt-3.6 development cycle.

Reviews, comments and testing are very welcome :-)

Best regards,

Martin

[1] http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32135/