Re: GWT vs SmartGWT

I've seen in the past many comments and different opinions about
Vaadin, GXT, SmartGWT and "GWT-only" apps. I think the fundamental
thing to remember here is resources.

If you work for a company where you can afford to have the designer/s,
a CSS savy person/s and the time to build and enhance more than
anything pure GWT widgets then by all means go with the GWT only
approach. Do that also if you know the app is being built and will be
there to stay for a loooooonnnng time.

However, in many cases we all seem to think that those frameworks
only provide cosmetic things and they really don't. They actually
provide a whole lot more than just style. Not all "GWT-only" widgets,
but many actually need a lot of work in both how they look as well as
how they are used programmatically.

Not too long ago I set out to build a pure GWT app (one man app only
and being built by someone, me in this case that have been building
GWT for quite some time) and I was the one that almost jumped off the
building in this case. I found myself, styling things, some of the
widgets needed a lot of extra boiler plate (take Cell Table for
instance), just to do basic stuff that using some of the other
frameworks mentioned would just be one or a few lines of code.

So if you have to make a decision, think about one thing and one thing
only. Do you truly have the resources/time, both design and coding
wise to enhance the existing GWT widgets? The answer to that will
likely tell you what to use and it's likely the reason why those
companies are such "value-add" to the existing GWT code base.

As far as performance goes, unless you are building an App for
something extremely, and I emphasize extremely demanding, there is
little to none chance that using GXT, Vaadin or SmartGWT will have an
actual impact on your app.

Alfredo

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 8:01 PM, Joseph Lust <lifeoflust@gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks in my company were just asking me this the other day. If you want an
> app that looks like the GXT or SmartGWT showcase, and absolutely nothing
> more, then use them. But you'll have to bend to their paradigms and extend
> their frameworks if you want more than they do. Further, these frameworks
> are heavy weight, so doing just what you need in GWT will be much faster
> performance wise. This is why we stick with pure GWT on my team and why
> another dev team in our company wanted to jump off a cliff after building a
> 400 screen app in GXT.
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Joseph
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Google Web Toolkit" group.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-web-toolkit/-/yKJ3UnRqsMMJ.
> To post to this group, send email to google-web-toolkit@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> google-web-toolkit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.



--
Alfredo Quiroga-Villamil

AOL/Yahoo/Gmail/MSN IM: lawwton

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group.
To post to this group, send email to google-web-toolkit@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-web-toolkit+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.