I must also give a big thumbs-down to GXT. The licensing is annoying and misleading, yes - you must buy support to get a usable version, making it rather bait-and-switch - but I'm willing to pay for good tools so that's not what I'm complaining about. If it did what it was supposed to, it would be well worth the $600.
I went quite a ways into implementation of a significant project with GXT and eventually ripped it all out went with straight-up GWT. I also have a fair amount of experience with ExtJS and jquery, so I'm not by any means a novice. The problems with GXT are basically summed up by: * The layout system is entirely different from GWT's. * All controls behave in highly non-intuitive ways. * There is nearly *zero* documentation, not even decent javadocs. * The examples, while pretty, do a very poor job of actually explaining how to use the controls. * The support team is very sluggish to respond to questions in forum posts, even by paid users. * If you want to deviate the appearance of a control even slightly, you are screwed. * The code download, even with code splitting, quickly becomes very large (600k+). That's not including the css and img downloads. * Code splitting is nearly useless because small pieces of framework are tied to much larger pieces of framework (ie, an entirely new panel & layout hierarchy). If you want to experience a very simple test to verify this, here's a frustrating exercise. Try to make a form that looks like this (two fields on one line): Name: [______________________] Age: [___] Sex: [_dropdown__] Sound simple? It's not. My development pace doubled when I gave up and switched back to straight-up GWT, and the results are a better user experience as well. GXT was a waste of $600 and one month of my time. Jeff -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
