I'm starting work on a smartGWT project in a few days and I'd like to know what kind of experiences you had. To avoid making this a bashing of smartGWT or GWT or a freestyle discussion, I'm going to provide some pointers for the discussion:
- Do you feel that the provided widgets are integrated well? Is there any widget you miss in particular?
- Have you encountered any problems when designing your application that were caused by the framework?
- Is the datasource integration as usefull as the smartClient team claims?
- What methods do you use to make your smartGWT application persistent? e.g. How well do Hibernate and smartGWT play with each other?
Feel free to add anything you feel is worth pointing out.
Answer
I guess you already have your answers, but I would like to add a few more comments that may affect your decision:
Pros:
- SmartGWT is the most compreensive LGPL GWT-based widgetery library you can find. So if you care for GPL pain, this is your thing
- Comprehensive Showcase.
- Really good performance (just check the Showcase).
- Very active community in the forums.
- SmartGWT extensions is another important project. For example, it has support for GWT-RPC based communication, which is not possible only with SmartGWT (unless you implement your own integration).
- Rapid pace of development from the SmartGWT guys. Just count the number of releases since the SmartGWT project appeared.
Cons:
- Besides the Showcase, I sometimes feel the only way to figure out how something works is by asking in the forums. This leads to a spread knowledge base. A community based wiki would be preferable.
- Large amount of static files you have to use with your application (the famous 'sc' directory) which might lead to problems if your back-end is in GAE (because of the 1000 files limit).