is smartGWT really as slow as its showcase is?

Question

I've started implementing my web application using smartGWT. Is it really as slow as it is on the showcase?

It's practically unreasonably slow.

I'm in a new empty project that all it does it display a modal window with a login form in onLoad.

this takes about 1 full minute to load.

I think it's just waiting for something and then poof it's loaded.

I'm running it from eclipse, just clicking the green run button.

Answer 1

Initially Smartgwt will take long time to load in client's browser.Because It downloads 2mb size of javascript files.But performance wise it is not slow.Because smartgwt is DIV based layouts.GWT is table based layouts.Following are the drawbacks of smartgwt:

1)Downloads lot of javascript files.

2)There is no image bundles used in smartgwt.Browser will make lot of requests for images.For a single button smartgwt uses 9 images.

3)Customization is difficult.Applying our own css style is bit tuff compare to GWT.

Features:

1)Datasource

2)Existing attractive widgets

3)Implementing animations are easy

So using smartGWT is depends on your requirement.If you have more time you can develope with GWT.If you have only less time and you have to develope big application use smartGWT.

Answer 2

We see people complain that their own (flawed) deployments are slow but not usually about the Showcase itself. Most likely, you've got your browser configured for development or have tools installed that are slowing things down.

First, see if you have set your browser to non-default cache settings (such as "check every time"). This could cause images to be repeatedly re-requested. You can see this if you open the "Net" panel in Firebug, or with IE, use a tool like Fiddler.

However, about Firebug, Firebug and similar development tools greatly slows down the performance of the browser and leaks a great deal of memory. To see the Showcase how a normal end user would see it, disable Firebug and restart your browser in case it has been leaking memory.

Answer 3

Just took another look at the question - you are running in GWT Hosted Mode, which is much, much slower than Web Mode (how your final application is deployed).

However, even your experience in Hosted Mode is much slower than what you should see. We'd had a couple of people with issues with hosted mode speed that ultimately found some kind of Eclipse / GWT misconfiguration was at fault - search the SmartGWT forums for some of the resolutions:

http://forums.smartclient.com/forumdisplay.php?f=14