On Dec 2, 2008, at 10:18 PM, Marius Dumitru Florea wrote:
I'm +0 right now. There are some things that I have to check about SmartGWT widgets:
* can I load only the widgets I use and not the whole library? * how much do they rely on GWT widget framework? * can I update to the latest GWT version without breaking them? * have they been written using deferred binding with browser specific code in different classes or do they wrap spaghetti JavaScript code? * are they easily customizable? * are their developers active on their forums/mailing lists?
These are all very good questions and we definitely need answers for them. One other point: if we don't use smartGWT which library will we use? I don't know many comprehensive widget libraries that: * are under a compatible license (Ext GWT/JS are not under a compatible license) * have both GWT and JS widgets * is comprehensive (i.e. we don't have various libraries, all having different look and feels) Note that I'm strongly against redeveloping widgets we need from scratch, as we've done for our live grid, our lightbox or for the sandbox calendar since it has almost all drawbacks you can imagine: * time consuming * hard maintenance (you need to fix all bugs + feature requests) * need to document them * less good than a specialized version where people have focused on developing it * will need to move to a standardized library in the future for sure, hence the double cost (cost of writing it in the first place + cost of dumping it and using the standardized library) Let's cross fingers and hope that smartGWT fills the bill. Thanks -Vincent
Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to propose using smartGWT/smartClient for all our widget needs both in GWT and in JS: * Their set is pretty impressive and has all we need. * It's under LGPL * Sanjiv has moved from Ext GWT to SmartGWT and since he's had a bad history with Ext GWT we can assume he has received enough reassurance from smartClient to remain open source and under the LGPL license. * It's both GWT and JS and we need both * The little of the source I have seen look very clean.
Some links: * http://www.jroller.com/sjivan/entry/smartgwt_1_0_released * http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/ * http://www.ongwt.com/post/2008/11/27/SmartGWT-%3A-A- QampA-with-Sanjiv-Jivan2 * http://www.smartclient.com/product/smartLGPL.jsp
Here's my +1 (barring any issue we see when we start using it of course)
Thanks -Vincent