Question

From the following list of frameworks, which one would you use to develop a rich web application and why would you choose it over the others?

Sproutcore
GWT
ExtJS
GXT
SmartGWT
Dojo / Dijit
Flex
Capuccino
Grails

Answer 1

These are based on my personal experiences using the frameworks you have mentioned. So yes, it is a bit biased. So as others have said over and over again, define your requirements and which one do you think fits your requirement based on what people have suggested here.

• GWT is too verbose eventhough I found many Java developers love GWT because you can unit test it and it’s all in Java. But I personally don’t like it because it is far from being simple. There are times when I feel I can tweak a little bit with Javascript, but with GWT I am enforced to do it with several lines of Java code.
• GXT is too far from GWT these days and you will find it difficult to do things as GXT has its own way of doing things which is way too different from GWT. When complex requirement come up, in the end you are going to go back doing plain GWT. And oh, their technical support is not that good either as I had several bad experiences when asking few questions to them.
• Ext-JS is good for simple stuff and the look and feel is really slick. But when things gets more complex, you are going to fight you’re way through. Eventhough I have dealt with the GXT tech support, I haven’t dealt with the ExtJS tech support since they have different people eventhough it’s in one company, so I can’t say much.
• Flex is nice, really nice. But again it is good for simple stuff. Once things gets more complicated you are going to write lots of actionscript, which is less enjoyable. There are many things that is available out of the box which may be to difficult if you have to code it in Javascript, like multimedia support. And oh, if you are writing for a public website you must consider that not too many user has flash plugin on their browser.
• Grails, I’m not sure how you would implement RIA apps with Grails since Grails is just another MVC framework which you need to add your own RIA framework on top of it such as the ones that you have mentioned.