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GUI Platform choice: Google GWT, SmartGWT, ExtGWT and SmartClient

We are in the process choosing a new GUI platform. Ive been looking at subj. but are a bit confused. Could someone please refer to at tutorial or blog that makes a qualified comparison.

Thanks. Nikolaj G.

Solution

  • We've used SmartGWT for a couple of projects and it's ok but there are tradeoffs:

    PRO:

    • Makes it easy to write a web app that looks and works like a rich client GUI.
    • Don't have to know any Javascript. SmartGWT coding is pretty similar to Swing coding, which is good if you already know how to do that.

    CON:

    • Unless you do a lot of work tinkering with the look and feel, your app won't look very web-like, it will look like a rich client app running in a browser. You may not care about this.
    • It's a pretty heavyweight library which has to download large .js files to get going.
    • We found it difficult to control the layout of form controls precisely, but that might just be our inexperience.