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.
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…
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.
gwt-incubator project is basically a gwt playpen area. It has a pretty good wiki with examples and descriptions. I just looked over the incubator trunk and compiled most of the demos and would like to share my summary of the widgets.
1) bulk loading table – basically a high performance HTML table generator based on innerHTML approach. No fancy demos, but here is the screenshot:
2) generator example – an example of a GWT generator. Nothing fancy but educational.
3) DatePicker – a pretty slick GWT calendar widget
4) Dropdown listbox – some kind of a new widget based a some newly prototyped GWT event model (it seems):
5) FastTree – again, another bulk generator this time for trees. Pretty neet and fast:
6) LogginDemo – basically an enhanced version of GWT logger for the browsers.
7) Paging scroll table and Scroll table – sophisticated grid/table widget supporting editing, column resizing, paging etc.
Pinned Panel – a neat sliding panel type widget with the panel capable of rolling from a side of the screen:
9) Progress bars – the oft requested GWT feature but for some reason missing from the core GWT:
10) Slider Bar – a powerful and sophisticated GWT slider implementation:
11) Spinners – anything non-visual that can spin, can be spinned 
. pretty interesting, IMO:
12) Style injector/Immutable Resource Bundle – injecting CSS into GWT compilation result using annotations, and writing code within CSS to customize for different browsers or what not.
13) YouTube widget (or any Flash object) – embed YouTube videos or whatever other objects using GWT.
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.
From the announcement
“We’re happy to say that the first Release Candidates for the Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit <http://code.google.com/p/gwt-google-apis/>are now ready to be taken for a test drive. The project is a collection of libraries that provide Java language bindings and API specific ‘plumbing’ for some Google JavaScript APIs. The goal is to make it easy for developers to use these JavaScript APIs with GWT. Libraries available at this time include a new version of Gears, as well as new libraries for Gadgets and the Google AJAX Search API.“
There is now a wrapper project hosted on Google Code for the Open Flash Charts 2. Open Flash Charts is just what it says is – an open source flash charting library, and quite slick looking I might add. And the GWT wrapper is : “The OFCGWT project provides a simple to use chart widget for GWT based on Open Flash Chart 2. It uses a heavily modified POJO bean model from OFC4J that is serialized using GWT JSON to provide the correct GWT Client data that meets the requirements of the OFC 2.x API. A beta version is available for early developer testing.”
And here is the link to the announcement on the GXT forums and here is a screen shot
