SmartGWT (UI part anyway) is open source, so you could modify it -- albeit
have to share it back -- but you are not stuck.  Many commercial libraries
are even harder to get a fix. Also, a feature any given person needs may not
be top priority.

Heck, I love GWT, but it needs better enterprise paging table widgets and
ready-made solutions for DTOs+RPC that work with the paging tables and the
related page editor forms since listing objects and updating them are very
common in enterprise configuration.  A nice customizable reporting feature
(perhaps via paging tables with built in search/selectors) is also needed.
But GWT isn't building these anytime soon from what I've gathered, and it
doesn't make GWT or Google bad.  They just have priorities that differ from
mine.  The incubator has some, but they are not pretty (too much work IMHO)
and appear to be under major revision, yet not here yet when I need
something now.  Shucks!

I am currently evaluating vaadin and as a java/jsp/servlet programmer, I
find their model quite appealing, though many may not.  And it's got ugly
APIs as well because it's also "mature" and thus was based on older naming
patterns, listeners, use of Object parameters that make it unclear what the
heck is expected, but they do have documentation and examples and
tutorials.  Naturally, they are missing a lot of key documentation to
explain the extra mile coding that all programmers really need, since
showcase examples are generally more trivial than anything in the real
world.  Heck, I spent a lot of time today just trying to figure out how to
make radio buttons whose values differ from the labels associated with the
radios since all of the examples (for select boxes too) were just where the
two were the same.  Nothing is perfect, but I do like their Table/Form
combos and the ability to do only server-side programming so there's no RPC
or DTOs to deal with.

But to each his own...  I personally found Ext GWT and SmartGWT to have
licensing warts, confusing documentation and like the comments above, a bit
abusive in their treatment of users.  Vaadin has a nice Apache 2 license,
but they also seem to have a low volume forum that shows a less robust user
base overall.  It's not clear if you can buy better forum/email support at a
reasonable price.

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