"I think SmartGWT has a ton of great widgets, but but but there is a HUGE price. Create a simple SmartGWT based project and watch how many files get loaded by your page. That, I think, is totally against the ideals of something like GWT. While SmartGWT may be a pretty good option for people on a deadline, if you want raw performance, stay away from it. The number of HTTP requests will simply kill your application."
I have to agree with that. The nice widgets smartgwt provides come with a huge price, the unzipped size of the js files are about 3m, and the rendering speed is just OK. sometime we should try out best to improve the compatibility and can't decide what client should do, namely a slow network or a crappy IE6, that is just normal.
While GWT is so promising about flexibility and compatibility , smartgwt as a wrapper can quickly help us to create some deadline project, but it limits our capability to implement our own widgets and communication framework. The performance won't be the best and the application won't be compatible with mobile devices. which I think are very important nowadays.
In terms of the data binding feature in smartGWT pro version, I am not interested at all. Binding page to domain model with XML, It's never a good idea based on my experience. Firstly you have to learn how to use the XML syntax to do the job, secondly application is not always about database and requirements can be various, not to mention the table relationship can be very complicated. So the project using data binding idea always ends up with a lot of tweaking code and workarounds.
I have to agree with that. The nice widgets smartgwt provides come with a huge price, the unzipped size of the js files are about 3m, and the rendering speed is just OK. sometime we should try out best to improve the compatibility and can't decide what client should do, namely a slow network or a crappy IE6, that is just normal.
While GWT is so promising about flexibility and compatibility , smartgwt as a wrapper can quickly help us to create some deadline project, but it limits our capability to implement our own widgets and communication framework. The performance won't be the best and the application won't be compatible with mobile devices. which I think are very important nowadays.
In terms of the data binding feature in smartGWT pro version, I am not interested at all. Binding page to domain model with XML, It's never a good idea based on my experience. Firstly you have to learn how to use the XML syntax to do the job, secondly application is not always about database and requirements can be various, not to mention the table relationship can be very complicated. So the project using data binding idea always ends up with a lot of tweaking code and workarounds.
2 comments:
The delivered size of the SmartGWT runtime is about 800k JavaScript compressed, not 3MB as claimed.
This size does not increase as your application grows bigger.
If you base your application on any other GWT framework, you may find that when you are just starting, it's smaller, but by the time you have finished it, you will have hit the same size anyway.
Meanwhile, because SmartGWT avoids many server requests *during actual use*, it has superior real-world performance for any application that where users spend at least a few minutes using it:
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_adaptive_filter_featured_category
SmartGWT does not limit the widgets you can create or limit the types of communication you can do in any way. People build custom widgets all the time, and SmartGWT can communicate with anything.
SmartGWT is compatible with mobile devices and is particularly suitable for applications that support an offline mode.
SmartGWT's databinding supports any kind of data service, not just XML or databases, nor is there any kind of assumption about table structures.
Probably the single most sophisticated suite of Ajax applications in the world exists at a major SF bay area biotech firm and was partly build by Isomorphic; it uses our databinding system throughout.
To understand how the databinding system actually works, see the QuickStart Guide:
http://www.smartclient.com/releases/SmartGWT_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf
Although SmartGWT binds to any kind of data or service, the SQL support is particularly strong. Here's just one example of a complex, multi-table grouped join expressed in far less code than it would take in any other framework:
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/#sql_dynamic_reporting
Yes,700k after gzipped. I am honored to get comment from Charles Kendrick the CTO. In fact I introduced smartgwt to my company and used it in my project. And now company is buying commercial license and using it for a new project. I do admire the talent of the smart client team and the framework really looks amazing. But the data binding thing haven't won my trust. I could be wrong but I still doubt the data binding thing can improve productivity for a consultant team like us. I would prefer code generating tools than those magics behind the scene, call me old fashion i rather use java code to gain more control.
Post a Comment