is smartGWT really as slow as its showcase is?

Question

I've started implementing my web application using smartGWT. Is it really as slow as it is on the showcase?

It's practically unreasonably slow.

I'm in a new empty project that all it does it display a modal window with a login form in onLoad.

this takes about 1 full minute to load.

I think it's just waiting for something and then poof it's loaded.

I'm running it from eclipse, just clicking the green run button.

Rosemaria

See below. User was running in GWT Hosted Mode, so this is not how an end user perceives the system. Nor is this experience even normal for hosted mode, where reloads take less than a second on a correctly configured machine. – Skerl

Answer 1

Initially Smartgwt will take a long time to load in client's browser because it downloads 2mb of javascript files. But performancewise it is not slow because smartgwt layouts are based on divs, but GWT layouts are based on tables.

The drawbacks of SmartGWT are:

1. Downloads lot of javascript files.
2. There is no image bundles used in smartgwt. Browser will make lot of requests for images. For a single button smartgwt uses 9 images.
3. Customization is difficult. Applying our own css style is bit difficult compare to GWT.

Features:

1. Datasource
2. Existing attractive widgets
3. Implementing animations are easy

So using smartGWT is depends on your requirement.If you have more time you can develop with GWT. If you have less time and you have to develop a big application use smartGWT.

Flan

The JavaScript runtime is normally delivered compressed, and adds up to 600k, not 2MB. Further, this is an intentional tradeoff, since it allows us to deliver features like Adaptive Filtering (smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/…), which greatly reduces server contact and server load. For enterprise applications that users repeatedly use for significant time periods, it's a very large advantage to reduce ongoing server contact in exchange for a large, one-time-ever initial download of cachable files. – Skerl

".If you have only less time and you have to develope big application use smartGWT." That's just bs. I'm on a huge Java project where we're using SmartGWT as UI framework. I find myself spending half of the time trying to make simple things work, and the other half compiling the GWT code... Developing SmartGWT is a pain in the ass. – Meridithmeriel

@Meridithmeriel I agree with U. I posted this long back. After that even I too faced this :-) – Flan

Your experience differs from the vast majority of SmartGWT users. Common problems are: trying to apply Google's MVP to SmartGWT (not applicable, leads to unnecessary code), using GWT-RPC (not recommend for very good reasons, see FAQ in SmartGWT forums), not following best practices w.r.t. data binding (see QuickStart Guide). – Skerl

This answer has become stale in another way - on modern browsers, the default skins no longer use images for buttons. For legacy browsers (aka IE7), you can choose between degraded appearance (eg, no round corners) or falling back to using images. – Skerl

Answer 2

Edit: this user was running in GWT hosted mode, which is 10x or more slower than compiled mode. So he was not experiencing an actual performance issue.

We see people complain that their own (flawed) deployments are slow but not usually about the Showcase itself. Most likely, you've got your browser configured for development or have tools installed that are slowing things down.

First, see if you have set your browser to non-default cache settings (such as "check every time"). This could cause images to be repeatedly re-requested. You can see this if you open the "Net" panel in Firebug, or with IE, use a tool like Fiddler.

However, about Firebug, Firebug and similar development tools greatly slows down the performance of the browser and leaks a great deal of memory. To see the Showcase how a normal end user would see it, disable Firebug and restart your browser in case it has been leaking memory.

Skerl

I have no such things installed. I'm just using IE7 and I'm a complete web newbie so I wouldn't have any of these installed (unless the eclipse pluging installer of gwt has, which I doubt) I have no trouble with SWT-Ext showcase or with GWT showcase. just smartGWT is literally "lagging". Just to make sure, I'll go to try it on a different computer too. – Rosemaria

As notes below - problem is that you are in GWT Hosted Mode. – Skerl

Answer 3

Just took another look at the question - you are running in GWT Hosted Mode, which is much, much slower than Web Mode (how your final application is deployed).

However, even your experience in Hosted Mode is much slower than what you should see. We'd had a couple of people with issues with hosted mode speed that ultimately found some kind of Eclipse / GWT misconfiguration was at fault - search the SmartGWT forums for some of the resolutions:

http://forums.smartclient.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14

Skerl