Is Ext-GWT still a nightmare?

Question

Just got back reading a question from 2 years ago here.

From there and several other places on the internet i concluded that developing with Ext-GWT was sucky.

My question is, with the release of GXT 3, whether it is still the condition now?

Kristine

Answer 1

I have several GXT applications, one of which is ~35K lines. Have not found any of the problems other people mention.

I was doing straight ExtJs/JavaScript, then moved to GWT with the advent of GWT-EXT and later moved to Ext-GWT (GXT). I would still be doing ExtJs/JavaScript today if it were not for those two toolkits.

Performance issues: non issue on modern browsers. on IE6/7, you want to use common sense, displaying 1000 rows in a grid is not the best idea, from a performance and usability standpoint.

Reinhart

Answer 2

GXT is still crappy. We've been using it and although it provides some nice widgets it takes forever to write any business code. Most of our time is spent trying to get GXT to do the things we want. For example, using RPC is painfull because you have to keep converting from JPA entity beans to ModelData object (or some other object that can be serialized over RPC), Also there are inconsistances such as if you want to use the FormBinding object (which automatically maps between form elements and ModelData), then you can't use FieldSets which are really useful. FormBinding will only work with FormPanels and not FieldSets.

Also if you want to use the FileUploadField object you can't test it in Dev mode because of the post URL.

Basically, if you want to add 40% more time to your development fine. But otherwise go with a normal JavaScript framework.

Quadrangular

Answer 3

We have been using GXT 2.x in the last one year while we built 3 projects with GXT.

Other than the lack of a WYSIWYG UI designer which makes the UI designing relatively slow compared to other frameworks, it is still IMO the best widgets library built on top of GWT.

So far we have not encountered any major issues with GXT.

Munro

Answer 4

A good performance comparision can be found here: http://gxtvsgwt.appspot.com/

Pectinate

thanks for the answer. however i'm aware of that performance comparison and that was not my question. my question is more about the 'coding experience' when using GXT. – Kristine

like comparing the GXT grid to the GWT grid is a fair comparaison? – Reinhart

Answer 5

In our current project we have been using Ext-GWT 2 for about a year without any major complaint. It's sometimes a bit buggy but generally works.

Demobilize

Answer 6

We used GXT 2.1.x for a year without any major problems. recently, we updated to GXT 2.2.4 and just needed minor changes in our code, but they weren't because of GXT, but due to the upgrade to GWT 2.3.0

Personally, i like coding with GXT. I can't see why someone would say GXT development is sucky, except for the already mentioned performance issues and the lack of a UI Designer.

I don't know any other GWT-based framework with so much features.

Vickey

There is a UI designer for GXT code.google.com/webtoolkit/tools/gwtdesigner/features/gwt/… – Reinhart