GWT Now

Darrell at Extjs announced a new patch build of Ext GWT – 1.2.3.  Besides fixing a bunch of bugs, one notable change is “Significant performance enhancements around layouts.”

I gave a try to the Ext GWT explorer demo and does in fact now feel significantly faster (it seems to be in my experience 1.5x – 2x times improvement in Firefox and Chrome). Those that are still using IE6 (get rid of it already! it’s 2009 after all) will still be out of luck, but who cares

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…

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…

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.

A new preview release of Ext GWT (1.1. Alpha 2) is now available for download here and includes a number of long awaited goodies: new grids implementation, portals, webdesktop, new forms etc. For a complete post describing the new features read  here.

It seems Darrell has been making quite a bit of progress lately on GXT – good stuff.

Darrell from ExtJs just released a preview of the new Grid component that will be part of Ext-GWT (GXT) v.1.1. Here are the previews of various grid views and an implementation of editable grid. More details on the implementation plans for the Grid component are here