Ajax SmartGWT!

Today, let me introduce a framework that builds on top of GWT Google Web Toolkit, it is called SmartGWT!



SmartGWT Release Notes 1.0 b2

• GWT 1.6 M1 and M2 support. GWT 1.5.3 continues to be fully supported
• New lightweight Enterprise Gray skin
• Performance improvements
• various API enhancements and bug fixes
• complete support for WebServices (WSDL)
• Additional Developer Tools (Inspect DOM and monitor RPC calls from hosted mode)
• Portal support and samples
• HTML based Print Preview support. No longer requires JSP
• Support for auto-arranging and overlapping Calendar events
• Support for checkbox selection for ListGrids
• improved support for users to wire DataSource's with GWT-RPC calls
• Improved javadocs
• Separated additional skins into a smartgwt-skins.jar
• Chrome, Firefox 3.1, and OSX hosted mode support

So what's so smart about SmartGWT?

SmartGWT is not just another Widget library. While most Ajax frameworks focus primarily on presentation and displaying mostly read-only data, either local or via XML / JSON, SmartClient was built with server side integration in mind. Most enterprise applications are not just about about data presentation, but about being able to propagate data changes made by the user to the backend. So while its tempting to use library X that has a cool tree widget, it's not until you actually try to use it your application that you encounter the real world hard problems. For example, how do you take data from your business objects on the server to not only display in a tree widget, but also be able to update your data model when, say, the user reorders the tree nodes or make edits / deletes in the UI.

Most Ajax frameworks stop short and leave it up to the user to manage state on the client side and propagating the changes to the server. This is no a trivial problem. Over the past few years UI widget libraries have improved significantly and there are now various options available to users. Simply put, having good looking widgets is not the hard problem today. In addition to having good looking widgets, having end-to-end integration of the UI components with the backend is the hard problem. It's this 20% of the functionality that takes 80% of the time in building most enterprise applications.



SmartGWT showcase: http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/




Reference:

1. GWT http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
2. SmartGWT http://code.google.com/p/smartgwt/