SmartGWT vs Vaadin

[Orest Ivasiv]

Hi All,

Does anyone has positive/negative experience with these libs?

Actually, I'm planning to build UI with Tree, Grid and TreeGrid components. Application has to have a lot of Panels, components, complicated business logic, etc.

I'm worry about performance. The main idea it to switch from existent legacy Applet application to plain JS/HTML.
Interesting about lazy loading UI components.
The key point is to chose lib with huge amount of UI's. And this lib have to has extension possibility.

Could you please share Your thoughts?

Thank You in advance,
Orest aka HalypH

[Harjit Singh]

Orest Ivasiv wrote:Hi All,

Does anyone has positive/negative experience with these libs?

Actually, I'm planning to build UI with Tree, Grid and TreeGrid components. Application has to have a lot of Panels, components, complicated business logic, etc.

I'm worry about performance. The main idea it to switch from existent legacy Applet application to plain JS/HTML.
Interesting about lazy loading UI components.
The key point is to chose lib with huge amount of UI's. And this lib have to has extension possibility.

Could you please share Your thoughts?

Thank You in advance,
Orest aka HalypH

I would check GXT also. I think you can choose any one between SmartGWT and GXT. Both of these libraries have more widgets than Vaadin.

[Charles Kendrick]

Definitely agree that if you looking for a large range of UI components with deep functionality, Vaadin is not really in the running. Also, Vaadin is a server-oriented architecture with server-side event handling, which means many more network round-trips than you get with Smart GWT.

As far as Smart GWT vs GXT, Smart GWT is a lot richer and has much better performance due its superior data management. I summarized feature advantages elsewhere and it's still current, so I'll post it here.

Note this list of feature advantages considers *only grids* - if it were framework wide, it would be many times longer. Also, this considers *only the free product* - since most people have to pay for GXT, an apples to apples comparison should include the entire set of SmartGWT Pro features on top of the list below - you can see those here:

http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/

The list:

Adaptive Filtering
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_adaptive_filter_featured_category

Databound Dragging
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_db_dragging_featured_category

Drag Reorder of columns
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_appearance_columnorder

Custom nested components (embed anything)
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#featured_nested_grid
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_nested_form_new_category

Pluggable data models (build a master-detail component for any data
model)
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#featured_master_detail

Frozen columns with editing, drag and drop and all other features
still supported
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_frozen_editing

Multi-level sort
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_multisort_new_category

Automatic cache synchronization on update
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/data/ResultSet.html

Multi-level filtering
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_nested_filter_builder

Multiple rows of headers
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_appearance_header_spans

User-specified formula and summary columns
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_appearance_formula_sumamry_builder

The CubeGrid (multi-dimensional data model support)
http://www.smartclient.com/index.jsp#basicCube
http://www.smartclient.com/index.jsp#analytics

A whole range of autoFit behaviors (not just this sample, the whole
folder)
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/#grid_autofit_filter

Also, all of these features also apply to TreeGrids (eg frozen columns
and full-row editing).

Also, SmartGWT's data connector architecture and it's ability to
support multiple caches on the same large data set, with independent
search criteria, sort direction, etc. This is needed for dozens of
use cases involving large data sets, such as moving records from one
category to another by drag and drop. GXT's "Store" is extremely
primitive by comparison and a lot of manual effort is required to
achieve something like this:
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/#row_drag_save

[Kai Wähner]

We use SmartGWT in our current project.

There are many widgets, and they are really nice and powerful. The server side support sounds nice true. At first...

BUT: The documentation of SmartGWT is very bad. Actually, documentation is barely available at all :-(
So, we have many problems to solve because of this. First, we wanted to buy support, but it is so exorbitant expensive!

So, you should evaluate SmartGWT, no question! But be aware, that using the server side features of it is not that simply - not because it is bad, but because there is a lack of documentation.

[Charles Kendrick]

Some older releases had missing documentation and some dangling links, but we are currently receiving a lot of complements on just how good the documentation has become.

I'm pretty sure you're just not aware of what documentation exists.

QuickStart Guide:

Conceptual overviews of all major server subsystems are in the Server Framework chapter:

http://www.smartclient.com/releases/SmartGWT_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf

Then are many further conceptual overviews in the JavaDoc itself, with lots of links to live demos w/source code. The QuickStart Guide will refer you to these, but here's a sampling:

http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/SgwtEESetup.html
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/ServerDataIntegration.html
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/DmiOverview.html
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/CustomQuerying.html
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/VelocitySupport.html
http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/FeaturesCustomPersistence.html

Complete reference of all properties settable in DataSource descriptors (.ds.xml files):

http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/javadoc/com/smartgwt/client/docs/serverds/package-summary.html

Complete JavaDoc of all server-side classes:

http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/server/javadoc/overview-summary.html

Take a look at what's there and I think you'll change your mind.

[Kai Wähner]

Take a look at what's there and I think you'll change your mind.

I will do that. Let's see if I change my mind :-)

[Kai Wähner]

Take a look at what's there and I think you'll change your mind.

Just wanted to give an update to other readers :-)

It is true: The documentation is much better than some time ago. The overall documentation (including the user guide and JavaDoc) deschribes many concepts and details.
I hope next we will get some good tutorials, best practices and maybe a book about SmartGWT :-)

[Kai Wähner]

Our project with SmartGWT is finished. We have some very good experiences with the widgets. And some bad experiences with the server-side integration and forum support.

I posted my "lessons learned" here:
http://www.kai-waehner.de/blog/2010/12/11/lessons-learned-smartgwt-2-3-component-library-for-google-web-toolkit-gwt/

So, SmartGWT is definitely worth trying! You have to decide if you also like the server-side integration, or just use the client-side.

Best regards,
Kai

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Thanks Kai for sharing, this is amazing.
Congrats for the project.