Best GWT widget library? [closed]

Answer 1

SmartGWT is a good library and it has a lot of examples but the user interface is not that sleek. For user interface Ext GWT is good.

Answer 2

Do not bind yourself to ANY of these libraries. Use Vanilla GWT to create the structure of your project. In particular, use the MVP pattern and an Event Bus. Please, see google article to know how to best design your client application with GWT: Building MVP apps

After, you can use any widget of these libraries (say a table, or a combobox, a datepicker, etc) and incorporate it to your project. Try to use extended components ONLY if you don't see a way to do it with vanilla GWT. This way you don't tie yourself to these libraries which are ALWAYS a pain when you try to do something that doesn't appear in the demo application, contain many bugs and their support are poor at best.

How to look for widgets should follow this order:

• First check GWT Incubator to see if there's what I'm looking for. http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/
• Then, if you are looking for something "cooler" check GWT Mosaic http://code.google.com/p/gwt-mosaic/

Careful with other libraries, I've worked with them (and still have nightmares).

Answer 3

smartGWT is slow and examples are lacking and it is very hard to find answers for even the basic questions, i.e. see all my non answered questions on this forum. I'm dumping smartgwt.

Answer 4

I would say if you need only a few widgets then build your own. You might copy-paste some concepts from the libraries mentioned. But they all lack one or the other thing. I have played with most of them and abandoned every one.

Answer 5

We've been doing gwt projects for more than 2 years, and we stick to the default widgets. We made our own open source library to autopopulate the default ones or our own widget extensions. Please check it, it's called gwt-jet. It's very well tested since we use it in large production environments, and we hope it will grow safely thru time.

Answer 6

gwt-mosaic's user group doesn't seem very active and I couldn't find a user's manual besides the wiki snippets. gwt-mosaic introduced me to two interesting tools.

1) gwt-mosaic includes a wrapper for Tibco's PageBus which is a publish/subscribe tool for the JS parts of your app (RPC handlers, widget callbacks, widget setters). This is an alternative to gwt's event bus.

2) gwt-mosaic encourages the use of Beans Binding (http://code.google.com/p/gwt-beans-binding/) for binding data to widgets and validating widgets.

smartgwt isn't cheap for the full feature set and support. The jar is too large for appengine unless you remove the theme files you don't use. They invest engineering on the server side too.

I've heard ext-gwt is sluggish and the JS files are large.

The gwt widget incubator looks deprecated. I believe the deluxe grid will be released with the new gwt.

The lack of look-and-feel, binding, and validation standards is hampering the interoperability of widget libraries.