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PlaceHistoryHandler has been split into a concrete PlaceHistoryHandler and the PlaceHistoryMapper interface, which you're free to implement yourself or use as before, giving your sub-interface to GWT.create() so that it generates the implementation from the @WithTokenizers annotation (and/or factory if you're using PlaceHistoryMapperWithFactory); this approach is similar to the ActivityManager vs. ActivityMapper, with the added generator for the mapper based on PlaceTokenizers and @Prefix.

Activity.Display now is com.google.gwt.user.client.ui.AcceptsOneWidget, which is implemented by SimplePanel (showActivityWidget is thus renamed as setWidget). IsWidget has been moved to com.google.gwt.user.client.ui and is now implemented by Widget (which returns itself); this means that if your view classes extends Widget (most views extend it through Composite) you no longer have to implement the asWidget method. In addition, all widgets now accept IsWidget as argument where they already accepted Widget.

I think the overall idea of activities is that they are short-lived instances, so they're effectively "lazily created" (actually, a new instance is created each time one is needed) and they don't need to be "awoken" because if they're not currently in use they're already "dead" and garbage collected. The ActivityManager (actually its associated ActivityMapper) will decide whether a particular activity is needed (and then instantiate it, possibly going through a GWT.runAsync for code splitting); the activity will listen to events its interested in *during its lifetime* (e.g. whether some object has changed or has been added or deleted, so it can update its view); but when it's done (stopped or cancelled), it's simply thrown away (the event bus passed to the start() method is a ResettableEventBus so all handlers have been automatically unregistered for you, which as a side effect allows the activity to be garbage collected). This is the (AIUI) intended use, but nothing forces you to write such short-lived instances: you can very well use singletons, but then you'll have the additional task of maintaining state between "runs" (start/stop or start/cancel), in which case your activity can listen to events from the event bus after being stopped/cancelled (just use the "real" event bus instead of the ResettableEventBus passed to the start() method); but it won't "ask to be revealed": navigation is handled at another layer, triggered on the PlaceController and handled by ActivityManagers.

often your places are "parameterized", think of a detail/edit screen for example that needs the model's id. The token is a generic way to provide additional information (via the URL) to the place (i.e. the activity/-ies), i.e. "#editFoo:42". You can of course re-use one place to dispatch to several activities based on the token. See the (currently not used) for ProxyPlace and ProxyListPlace in the Expenses sample for an example.

I think the overall idea of activities is that they are short-lived instances, so they're effectively "lazily created" (actually, a new instance is created each time one is needed) and they don't need to be "awoken" because if they're not currently in use they're already "dead" and garbage collected. The ActivityManager (actually its associated ActivityMapper) will decide whether a particular activity is needed (and then instantiate it, possibly going through a GWT.runAsync for code splitting); the activity will listen to events its interested in *during its lifetime* (e.g. whether some object has changed or has been added or deleted, so it can update its view); but when it's done (stopped or cancelled), it's simply thrown away (the event bus passed to the start() method is a ResettableEventBus so all handlers have been automatically unregistered for you, which as a side effect allows the activity to be garbage collected). This is the (AIUI) intended use, but nothing forces you to write such short-lived instances: you can very well use singletons, but then you'll have the additional task of maintaining state between "runs" (start/stop or start/cancel), in which case your activity can listen to events from the event bus after being stopped/cancelled (just use the "real" event bus instead of the ResettableEventBus passed to the start() method); but it won't "ask to be revealed": navigation is handled at another layer, triggered on the PlaceController and handled by ActivityManagers.

I believe the reason we've not created View and Presenter interfaces to date is because there are two different styles of MVP widely in use, only one of which allows the view to call the presenter as in your example. Which leaves us in the funny position that the new MVP framework is missing *formal* definitions of View and Presenter. Personally, I think it's a good thing that GWT Activities and Places are independent of views and presenters so as not to force you into one model. I think View and Presenter as you've described would fall in the category of things that are not quite core code, but are nevertheless useful abstractions that probably need a home in the GWT source somewhere for reference. We'll chew on this a bit for 2.1.1...

The way we're minimizing code right now, is by creating some useful abstract tokenizers that handle the common use cases (no parameter tokenizer, key-value pair tokenizer). With those there are corresponding abstract tokenizers that handle creating the hashCode and equals methods. Aside from the 1:1 between Place and Activity, which bothers me in principle but may not be a practical concern just yet, it's coming along pretty nicely.

The kinds of changes to Activities and Places we're contemplating for future versions of GWT are primarily along the lines of using annotations and generators to automate the creation of PlaceTokenizers and ActivityMappers, for example. We're not talking about wholesale replacement, as we strive for API backward compatibility with each release.

How to navigate To navigate to a new Place in your application, call the goTo() method on your PlaceController. This is illustrated above in the goTo() method of HelloActivity. PlaceController warns the current Activity that it may be stopping (via a PlaceChangeRequest event) and once allowed, fires a PlaceChangeEvent with the new Place. The PlaceHistoryHandler listens for PlaceChangeEvents and updates the URL history token accordingly. The ActivityManager also listens for PlaceChangeEvents and uses your app's ActivityMapper to start the Activity associated with the new Place. Rather than using PlaceController.goTo(), you can also create a Hyperlink containing the history token for the new Place obtained by calling your PlaceHistoryMapper.getToken(). When the user navigates to a new URL (via hyperlink, back button, or bookmark), PlaceHistoryHandler catches the ValueChangeEvent from the History object and calls your app's PlaceHistoryMapper to turn the history token into its corresponding Place. It then calls PlaceController.goTo() with the new Place. What about apps with multiple panels in the same window whose state should all be saved together in a single URL? GWT 2.1 does not attempt to provide a generic implementation of a composite Place; however, your app could create a CompositePlace, CompositeActivity, and CompositePlace.Tokenizer classes that delegate to the constituent members. In this case, only the composite objects would need to be registered with your app's ActivityMapper and PlaceHistoryMapper.