Funny thing, someone just responded to one of my threads on the Ext GWT forum and reminded me why I gave up on it: the crappy attitude of the authors (summarized: "it's not a bug, it's supposed to act broken"), even after I gave them code to fix their product.
http://www.extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=79790 Seems like this thread isn't complete without including this link. Jeff On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 12:18 PM, Jeff Schnitzer <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
