Revenge of the Zombie Thread ... I am currently the owner/maintainer/code monkey behind a fairly complex GWT application. It is primarily data driven, but there is plenty of logic in the UI for role-based editing permissions, visibility, and coordinating different components of the application. It utilizes a centralized event bus and application model to keep everything on the same page.
My experience with the widgets has been a pretty good one. The only thing that was lacking, but has been improved to a significant degree, was grids. With the new cell widgets, this is _almost_ no longer an issue. Static headers and sorting are really the only remaining things desired in these components. One minor caveat was the inability to directly re-use our business objects, as that project references DAOs (a horrible design decision, mind you, but I am stuck with it) and those don't work so well in JavaScript. We ended up writing a new business layer and translator objects. Not a small undertaking, but not difficult either. Also, client side calendar support sucks balls (to use a technical term) right now. Workable, but not nice. Overall, I've been pleasantly surprised with GWT. I normally despise web development, so that statement has a bit of weight behind it. I was able to apply more traditional Software Engineering principles and design patterns to the application (to the dismay of the web guy I was working with) and the environment felt very similar to developing a standard java swing application. As long as Google supports it (which, admittedly, is a bit of a worry), I will be happy to use it. Probably. Well, I might be angry, but that likely wont be GWTs fault. -Ben On Jan 18, 4:55 am, Kristjan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi... I am also interested in questions below... Anyone with > experience on larger project... > > with br > KK > > On Dec 9 2010, 8:50 pm, dhoffer <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I have some questions about the new 2.1 release, how this compares to > > prior releases, and other GUI libraries. First a little background... > > > I've used prior versions of GWT in a couple of applications, versions > > 1.5 and 1.7 I believe. In both cases what we found most lacking in > > GWT was an extensive UI widget library so in one case Mosaic was used > > and in another ExtGWT. The applications are not your standard web- > > site application, they are more like desktop apps redesigned for the > > web. > > > I see that GWT 2.1 has built-in support via Roo for very easily > > creating a database app that has the basic UI for seeing and editing > > some database tables/etc. > > > However what if one is creating an application that is not a simple > > database view/edit application but rather has lots of business logic > > that changes what is in the UI? I.e. the UI is not driven directly by > > what is in the database but is driven by business logic that is driven > > by both the user's choices and database data? > > > So I guess my question is how does Roo help if its not the simple use > > case? > > > Regarding UI widgets, has this improved in 2.1? I can't recall > > exactly what I was missing but it seemed GWT's UI library was a small > > subset of ExtGWT for instance. > > > However I am worried about starting a new application using ExtGWT as > > I suspect that is being developed in a separate track from GWT 2.1 and > > lots of things won't work together so I'd not be able to follow a GWT > > 2.1 design approach. > > > Please let me know your experiences using 2.1 for non-trivial > > applications and your thoughts on using ExtGWT. Is there an extension > > GWT UI widget library(s) that does follow the 2.1 design approach? -- 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.
