I guess that most of you agree with me that UI is one of the most painful aspects of building Web applications (at least if you compare it with backend development). Well if you are building a Web application using GWT you may be tempted to use SmartGWT as it provides really cool widgets. Well, that’s true, their widgets are really cool and the themes are great. However, I would like to explain my experience using SmartGWT for a personal project (a first version of the app is shown below).
Ok, so let’s try to fix the autocomplete problem using the SuggestBox that GWT provides OOTB. Well, another bad idea as SmartGWT randomly works with GWT and they clearly mentioned in their docs that it is not recommended to mix both.
I’m my case it is ridiculous paying for a license and I must say that I’m used to the business model that other open source products have (e.g. Mule, Spring, Hibernate) that you pay for support though you are able to extend the framework easily.
A small suggestion from a disappointed engineer: you have one of the best GWT UI libraries in the market that look perfect and your widgets are really cool, don’t screw it up with this mix which is NOT easy to extend.
At the end, I tried for a couple of days to implement a workaround, the solution was not stable enough to be used in a real application. I end up implementing a basic window and toolbar in plain GWT using GWT Drag and Drop and reuse some of the SmartGWT styling. The results are shown below; now I have an extensible solution that I can fix in case of problems 🙂 but with the overhead of having to fix it myself :(.