Well done. I've been using SmartGWT for a while now, and to say the least it is a pleasure to use, with an active community and responsive forums. If like me, you prefer to use tried and tested Object Oriented techniques over XML hell, have a good look at Smart GWT.

Maybe SmartGWT is open sourse, however smartclient (http://www.smartclient.co) is not. Should I buy a smartclient license to use smartgwt?

Maybe SmartGWT is open sourse, however smartclient is not

Beeeeep - wrong! See http://www.smartclient.com/product/download.jsp :

SmartClient LGPL (free and open source - works with any server)

Smartclient is too good to be true but indeed it is free. Regards, Raffaele

Thanks Raffaele. I tried to use smartclient some times ago and at that time it was not open source. I was missing that releases after 6.0 are LGPL. thanks again. regards G

Of course, there is no free lunch ;) The company behind SmartClient is not running for charity. The LGPL edition is best for "open source projects & hobbyists." (according to their official website: http://www.smartclient.com/product/index.jsp) This open source edition has only about 1/3 features of Pro or Enterprise edition. Pro edition start from $745 per developer.

Hello Andreu, You're correct that the Pro and Enterprise versions have many, many invaluable features. However, the free version (SmartGWT LGPL) is already extremely popular because it offers more breadth and depth of features than any alternative GWT framework. Pro & Enterprise simply give you yet more. The availability of commercial editions of SmartGWT allows us to invest more in feature development, which is necessarily spread across the free and commercial versions (notice how the majority of new features announced here http://blog.isomorphic.com/?p=130 are for the free version). So purchasing Pro or Enterprise is an opportunity to buy cutting edge commercial tools and support free, open source software at the same time.

Ext GWT is definitely much more popular and cheaper than smartGWT. As SmartClient official website suggests, SmartGWT LGPL free edition is for open source projects and hobbyists. Not for me.

You probably haven't had a look at the smartgwt showcase that was built using the LGPL version. It offers everything that GXT provides plus more. Having worked with both frameworks I can tell you from personal experience the codebase of SmartGWT is more robust than GXT and has fewer bugs.

ExtGWT is not cheaper. The free version of SmartGWT has many more features than the paid version of ExtGWT. Just compare the showcases for the two products and it's very obvious. That's one reason so many ExtGWT users are looking at switching to SmartGWT. The other reason people are switching is that ExtGWT falls over in heavy-duty use cases like large, editable grids that SmartGWT handles easily. SmartGWT is the more complete, more robust technology. There's a simple reason our website says the LGPL version is for hobbyists: it's a no-brainer for a professional developer to buy Pro. Your time is worth money and you shouldn't be spending it re-inventing features that already exist in Pro. However, any edition of SmartGWT is a better choice for enterprise application development than ExtGWT.

More better features than SmartGWT? Ha! Look closer at ExtGWT website. So many ExtGWT users are switching to SmartGWT?? Please speak in numbers! Compare the web traffic on Alexa or any other tools. You will find who is the obvious winner. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/extjs.com+www.smartclient.com

By all means, compare the two websites, as I've been suggesting all along. ExtGWT Showcase: about 60 samples, mostly dummy data and flat files http://extjs.com/explorer/ SmartGWT Showcase: about 300 samples, most databound http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwt/showcase/ SmartGWT Pro/EE Showcase: about 60 additional samples, in-depth Hibernate, Spring, SQL and WSDL binding http://www.smartclient.com/smartgwtee/showcase/ If you look at other discussions, you can see that most people take it as a given that SmartGWT has much greater breadth and depth. As far as traffic, do you want volume or quality? People often comment that the SmartClient Forums are a more effective resource. Ext attracts a large proportion of people building simple web sites rather than enterprise applications, and all the traffic is mixed together. If you're an enterprise developer, that extra volume is just noise you need to sift through. Try a few sample searches on the two forums and see where you're getting better, more relevant information.

I think SmartGWT has had 2 problems: 1. It did not look professional enough (fixed) 2. It feels sluggish - a lot! I am glad #1 has been fixed with the 'enterprise' theme, speed however remains a major issue. It kind of feels slightly faster than a server side framework though much slower than lets say ExtJS / GXT and even more slower than pure GWT. In addition, the showcase could do better with a less overwhelming set of examples. ExtJS are doing a better job exposing, or 'selling', their solution with fewer examples and to the spot.

Dimitris - Thanks for the feedback. SmartGWT / SmartClient is actually pretty fast. It's the lack of sprites in the Enterprise theme that makes it appear a little slower but its far from being as slow as any server side framework. Users can decide this for themselves. You'll notice that the Fleet theme, while not as polished as the Enterprise theme, is a lot faster as it uses limited media and is a lot more lightweight. Incorporating sprites / ImageBundles is a high priority and when this happens, the responsiveness will improve a fair bit without any change in user code. Regarding the showcase, it's hard to keep all users happy. The "Featured Samples" in the Showcase is intended to highlight key features with a smaller subset of samples. The casual user can browse through these 20 odd samples to get a flavor of what SmartGWT has to offer. We found that having over 250 samples covering most common usecases helps users a lot as they can essentially learn by example. This app also serves as an example of a real world larger application as it pretty much uses all the components in SmartGWT and users can get a sense of what to expect in terms of performance as their application grows.