SmartGWT Step by Step...

Hi, I am curious about this post as this post will attempt to teach you a very beautiful rich user interface backed by the SmartClient technology that is SamrtGWT.
Smart GWT is a GWT based web application framework that allows you to not only utilize its comprehensive widget library for your application UI, but also tie these widgets in with your server-side for data management. Smart GWT is based on the powerful and mature SmartClient library.

Smart GWT is compatible with GWT 1.5.3 , GWT 1.6.4, GWT 1.7.x and GWT 2.0.x

So what's so smart about SmartGWT?

Let me try to explain. SmartGWT is not just another Widget library. While most Ajax frameworks focus primarily on presentation and displaying mostly read-only data, either local or via XML / JSON, SmartClient was built with server side integration in mind. Most enterprise applications are not just about about data presentation, but about being able to propagate data changes made by the user to the backend. So while its tempting to use library X that has a cool tree widget, it's not until you actually try to use it your application that you encounter the real world hard problems. For example, how do you take data from your business objects on the server to not only display in a tree widget, but also be able to update your data model when, say, the user reorders the tree nodes or make edits / deletes in the UI. How do you display hierarchical data where nodes may have hundreds of children? And so on..

Most Ajax frameworks stop short and leave it up to the user to manage state on the client side and propagating the changes to the server. This is not a trivial problem! Over the past few years UI widget libraries have improved significantly and there are now various options available to users. Simply put, having good looking widgets is not the hard problem today. In addition to having good looking widgets, having end-to-end integration of the UI components with the backend is the hard problem. It's this 20% of the functionality that takes 80% of the time in building most enterprise applications. Click here to read more about SmartGWT.

Now what is the difference between SmartClient and SmartGWT?

SmartGWT is a GWT wrapper around SmartClient LGPL. If you use SmartGWT, you build your UI using Java. If you use SmartClient LGPL directly, you build your UI using JavaScript. They both expose the same set of components and capabilities, so which one you use is a matter of existing skills and language preference.

Like SmartClient LGPL, SmartGWT does not require the SmartClient Server and works with any server technology (Java, .NET, PHP, etc).

Now have a look on the beauty of SmartGWT from the showcase here.

In the next post I will explain how to start using SamrtGWT. Be ready for it.

3 comments:

Sabbir Manandhar said...

for informations about smartgwt also see

http://smartgwtissues.blogspot.com/

Uditha said...

Your explanation is also "SoSmart"
:-)

Sanjeev Kulkarni said...

Thanks Udita...