SmartGWT with GWT?

Question

Greetings , I have been using GWT for few weeks and wanted a rich Table widget.I came across with SmartGWT library. Can I use SmartGWT widgets same way I develop using GWT o

Answer 1

You would not be able to just choose a widget from SmartGWT as they rely on the rest of the framework. SmartGWT is a thin wrapper using JSNI around the SmartClient library. This is a nice library, but you need to adopt it all or none.

I believe this misses the point of GWT as you are just wrapping Javascript, so if Google adds support for another browser, you will not be able to support it SmartClient does. Also, you miss all the new benefits of Code Splitting etc as the JS library will always download in full. You may be able to split the GWT code though.

ExtGWT is another choice. This is a full Java implementation. It's still an all or nothing approach, but at least it does leverage the GWT compiler to the full.

Do make sure you check the licenses of each as I believe the SmartGWT one is a bit more liberal that ExtGWT.

There is always the widgets in the GWT Incubator and GWT Mosaic projects. These are written to be very tightly knitted to GWT. Indeed the code in the Incubator may find its way into GWT when it matures. There is a nice table widget in the Incubator I believe.

I hope this helps a bit.