I've been using GXT (Ext-GWT) for quite some time now. While it certainly looks nice and provides a good amount of functionality lacking in GWT, there are several drawbacks.
1) It is very buggy. Bugs get fixed fairly fast, which is good, but I find myself submitting an abnormally large amount of bugs. While the developer (singular) is very responsive, passionate about his work, and friendly, the code isn't exactly up to the standards that was hoping for. 2) It is not just a set of widgets, it's a complete framework on top of GWT. Your team will have to invest time to learn it. Intermingling GWT widgets and GXT widgets is possible, but confusing IMHO. Which leads me to my next issue. 3) Documentation is still very lacking, although they're working on it... 4) There's some really iffy design decisions. a) The use of generics is not only inconsistent, but in many cases it's not even possible to use generics due to API bugs. The example I was going to post was actually just fixed in the release today. b) While the widgets look nice and performance is OK, you are forced to back the GXT components (like Grid, Tree, List) with GXT specific data model objects. If you have a simple Employee POJO, and you want to add it to a GXT Grid, you have to either wrap it in a Model or ModelData class, or you have to implement a marker interface and do a bit of trickery to get it in the Grid. The only reason for all of this is to support binding (since GWT doesn't support reflection). I would much rather have preferred a Swing like TableModel and an optional binding layer on top of it. c) The widgets look nice out of the box and customizing them slightly with CSS is pretty easy. However, if the changes require you to alter the HTML of a GXT component, you're in for a world of pain. The HTML markup is tied heavily into the functionality of the widgets and is referenced throughout the class either by tag name, tag id, or by css "class". IMHO, the UI should be completely separate from the functionality of the widgets. 5) Size. The CSS itself is ~80k. On the plus side, it's nice to have a pure GWT library in which I can step into Java code (which you will have to do quite often!). The widgets look and function very nicely. It would take a lot of time and money to write many of the widgets GXT provides. If you plan on using it as is, it works fine. On Dec 19, 10:13 am, "Juan Backson" <juanback...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > I have been using GWT for almost 6 months now. In the past six months, I > have tried migrating code from pure GWT to GWT-EXT and then to Smart-GWT. > > They all have drawback: > > GWT - no good looking widget > GWT-Ext - very buggy and GPL licensing > Smart-GWT - slow and memory intensive > > Is there any library that has the same capability of Smart-GWT and good > performance? > > Thanks, > JB --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
