I’ve been developing a travel planning site – tripgrep.com – which is built on appengine, GWT and smartgwt, among other technologies. It is still early days, and the site is now working well on my development environment, which is either a windows or mac computer.
However, I am frequently talking up the website to my friends when we are at a bar or other venue, so I am standing there while they try to access the site via an iPhone, Android or Blackberry – I’ve witnessed all three. It has been painfully obvious that the browser based frontend takes a long time to download on a mobile device. I am pretty sure this is because of the javascript download for SmartGWT.
So, I would like to look at alternatives to SmartGWT.
What I like about SmartGWT is that it has a reasonable look and feel out of the box – I don’t need to learn any design or css and it has an office application look. This is considerably better than the GWT built-in widgets, which just get a blue border. The better look-and-feel is why I went with SmartGWT early on. However, the slow load times are killing me on these mobile demos. So now I want a fast loading widget alternative that has good look-and-feel out of the box.
The features I care about are: tabs, good form layout, Google maps API integration, grid data viewing. If those are all available in a library that loads quickly on a mobile device, then that’s the library I want.
Your best bet is probably just to use the standard GWT widgets and learn how to style them to your liking. SmartGWT’s automatic styling is nice, but as you’ve noticed, it comes with a price.
Even GWT’s standard widgets, which are lighter, could still be trimmed down for maximum speed, so if you’re really adventurous you could roll your own light-weight widgets that do only what you need them to do.