Folks at SmartClient/Isomorphic have published a new skin for the library which looks quite nicely. Below is the eye candy from the latest compiled SmartGWT build – looks pretty sharp.
I’ve been watching over the past few months the progress of the ftr-gwt-library, which is basically striving to become “Google look a like Week calender”. I’d say they are getting closer to their goal with every month passing by.
Decided to pay a little bit more attention to this blog and moved it over from overly restricted wordpress.com to beluehost and updated the look and feel in the process.
There is apparently soon going to be a livegrid implementation for GXT/Ext-GWT, similar to the one that exists for ExtJs, SmartClient/SmartGWT, and ItMill. There is already a demo and all (no source or anything else) – but worth checking out out anyway. And the announcement.
I personally have no idea whether paging is better than live grids for usability – none of the rich UI desktop systems I’ve worked on used paging (10000 or even 100000 rows is not too bad for the user if responsiveness is good and sorting/drilling is organized well), however none of the web apps I’ve developed or used had more than 200 rows per “page”. I think the key is in the UI organization around the grid and visual responsiveness of components…
I’m sure by now the news of the new GWT widget framework – SmartGWT – has reached developer circles. Sanjiv has done a great job bringing out yet another great javascript framework to the java/GWT development world.
There is now also a little portal example that is getting integrated into SmartClient and SmartGWT – here is the forum post announcement and the demo after the break.
oh, yeah – GXT 1.2 is out – choke full of new goodies (mostly around Drag and Drop), grid data binding, bug fixes etc. Don’t know about you, but it seems to feel a little snappier with this release, at least on the few individual examples I tried…
Back from blogging hiatus. Rejoice my fellow geeks! Asynchronous java(script) loading is now part of GWT trunk – post 1.6 it seems. The r3901 merge has done it, and you can now fearlessly start hacking your way through this very early, although looking pretty mature feature. It’s now time to whip out all all of your 1Mb+ GWT modules and break them apart into a thousand 1K pieces 
what does the code look like you might ask? Here you go:
GWT.runAsync(new RunAsyncCallback() {
public void onFailure(Throwable caught) {
callback.onFailure(caught);
}
public void onSuccess() {
callback.onSuccess(onInitialize());
}
});
where onInitialize() can have whatever your complex nature desires.
Haven’t tried this particular build yet, but looking forward to, in a few days.
There is a new framework on the GWT block – gwt-mosaic – which is basically a cleverly put together collection of widgets from GWT, gwt-incubator, and gwt-dnd. On the surface the showcase of the framework looks very similar to GWT, but soon enough you’ll realize the little but very important things it adds to GWT like more advanced dialogs, additional layouts, tool buttons, treetable, paging scroll table, etc. Since these widgets are based on already available and tested ones from Incubator and gwt-dnd, this new framework even now looks pretty good and is relatively stable.
It’s a very early version right now, but I think is worth following. It’s licensed under Apache 2.0.
There is a new version (1.1) of Ext-GWT library available with all kinds of goodies – Grids, Bean Model/Factory,Web Desktop, Slate theme, Live Combo Box. Slick stuff and definitely a great framework that anyone starting in GWT needs to consider!
One thing I wish for is that Ext-GWT was better interoperable with native GWT widgets/layouts. But maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, since I also understand the complexity of getting RIA stuff work smoothly across the browsers and various hacks developers put into place to deal with cross browser issues.
I wanted to post some instructions for getting GWT compiler working with Maven2, at least the I way I use it in some of my gwt development. I hope developers using Maven for their build will find this useful, since unfortunately GWT doesn’t support maven out of the box. There is a third party Maven2 plugin already available for GWT, however I personally find that using raw GWT compiler is rather more flexible. read more »
