Best GWT widget library? [closed]

Answer 1

Definitely not SmartGWT. Their framework is bloated and has a very half-baked nature. They have a million widgets, but trying to get them to work for your project is not easy. Datasources complicate the process of managing your data in a very big way, for example, in order to get to data in your datasource, you must use fecth and inspect often. While you can cache the results, it is not always easy to interrogate them.

RPC is another weak and convoluted area. There is contradicting information in the documentation and in the forums. While the documentation will say that you should rarely use a custom operation as part of a ds, they forum will tell you that it's perfectly fine. Learning to use these tools effectively is an uphill climb on the best of days.

They will oversell the product. For example, the charting/analytics package contains graphs... But those graphs won't display negative values or let you manipulate axis labels in any meaningful way. And they openly respond to queries about this on the forum with a "yeah so what" attitude. "We don't plan on adding that to 3.0x even though that's one of our selling points, it's on our road map." When they sold me the package, they never mentioned that I couldn't display negative values. Really? What graph would not need to be able to show negative values? I can think of only one- the one depicting the number of unhappy Isomorphic customers.

Stay away from these guys, and head over to any competitor's site, for example ExtJS, JQuery, heck even quxdoo. There are a few projects out there that are really gaining ground and actually offer a good solution.

Take great caution if you ever evaluate this product. It looks nice, but about two weeks in to the project using it, you'll start seeing what I mean. Widgets are half baked, datasources are extremely over complicated, and just because you paid for forum support, doesn't mean you'll actually get anything other than snide, condescending answers that at first will make you think you missed something. You didn't they're generally very arrogant.

Best of luck, and stay away from this product if you value your development time and maintainability. Oh and one last thing. Look at the MVC example on their web site. It has literally nothing to do with MVC other than the label reads "MVC". They'll try to convince you that such frameworks are for inexperienced developers, and that such a concept has no place in real programming... Kinda like those try catch blocks.

Answer 2

Two important things -and what the most of libraries miss- are unit testing and debugging. It is where GWT shines. If you use a library which is based on vanilla js, you give away the ability to unit test and debug your project. As a GWT developer you should consider these points and use a library with no or minimal js dependency.

Answer 3

My experience shows that there are always many problems with 3rd party libraries. The best way - is to use well-known and well-maked technology itself plus your own components. It may take a longer time to write and maintain them, but TCO is always at lower level.

3rd party libraries often can break your plans unexpectedly. And it's hard to find and fix the source of problem.

So I'd suggest to use plain GWT.

Answer 4

Depends on what you mean by "best". Best looking? Best API? Best for extending to your own custom needs?

E.g., I was just evaluating table classes to use in our application. We've been using GWT-Ext, but it has many performance problems for us, and is very hard to get the tables sized the way we need them. I came very close to going with GWT-Mosaic, but decided instead to build off the widgets in the GWT Incubator.

So, why did I make this choice? It seems that too many of the libraries out there come with their own, for lack of a better word, baggage. Either you have to dive whole-hog into some MVC framework (which may not be entirely compatible with the rest of your code base), or you have to adopt someone's new fangled layout system, or you have to live with the fact that you cannot really debug the code (because its just JSNI wrappers).

Don't get me wrong, the GWT Incubator isn't perfect...the widgets there are in some amount of flux. In my case, this was the best choice, though. It gives me good (but definitely not perfect):

• API
• Extensibility
• Look and feel (well, this is kinda weak, but that's what CSS is for.)

So...the answer (for me) is a combination of:

• Stock GWT widgets (with lots of custom styling)
• GWT Incubator tables
• A few home-grown widgets

(I should add: the "baggage" I'm referring to isn't necessarily a bad thing. But, if you just want a widget or two, it can raise the bar on what it takes to just get your work done and how good youe application looks.)

Answer 5

Didn't see this one mentioned, Vaadin (previously known is IT Mill Toolkit), but maybe that's because it's not technically exactly GWT; as their FAQ says:

How does this differ from GWT?

GWT applications run in the browser, while Vaadin applications run on the server. We do actually use GWT as a "rendering engine" on the browser side, so you can combine Vaadin and GWT.

Answer 6

I am using GWT for a year. After lots of research, I have decided GWT Mosaic as a widget library.. Mosaic uses some of the GWT incubator components such as PagingScrollTable.. But the features of the combobox and table are not sufficient for us.. That is why, we have extended these components to add needed functionality.