Which web application framework?

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

This is strictly a matter of opinion. You will not get any definitive answers from anyone, since anyone that answers will have one or another that they personally prefer.

Try each one for long enough to decide which one is best for your (or your team's) purposes.

That being said, I prefer GWT. Others will invariably disagree with me.

Reasons that I like GWT:

• You can share (some) client- and server-side code (as long as your server is written in Java)
• GWT makes a lot of advanced performance features really easy (e.g., deferred JS loading, image spriting, CSS obfuscation)
• A focus on one-page apps, with third-party support for Places (using the gwt-presenter library)
• It's just as easy to add GWT to an existing web page as it is to create a full one-page GWT app
• UiBinder allows you to write your UI using a declarative HTML-like syntax; you're not stuck writing Swing-like UI if you don't want to
• Browser incompatibilities are (mostly) taken care of by GWT -- you just write Java code, and GWT compiles it to work on every browser

Things that may make GWT not right for you:

• If your server is already written in something besides Java, you will still be able to write your UI in GWT, but you'll lose out on some nice features
• Compilation time using GWT is a non-trivial cost -- Development Mode mitigates this a lot, but it's still an issue sometimes
• As others have mentioned, GWT can be considered "verbose" compared to simple JavaScript libraries like jQuery or ExtJS

Answer 2

I am currently working on a grail/flex hybrid app that is working a lot better than I expected. I have looked at GWT but there were not a lot of books about it at the time and it seemed to stress the leveraging of Swing-like programming techniques which I have never liked. I agree with the comment about trying them all out. Run hello app they all have and measure how hard or easy it is to modify. Also tool (IDEs, Maven, CI...etc) support can be a big factor as well in terms of being immediately productive.

Answer 3

Unfortunately the answer will be opinionated, GWT in it's purest form is not an eye-candy. That being said, ExtJs GXT is super hunky dory. One of the major issues I face with evolving frameworks is that they are not absolutely defect free, If I remember correctly, GWT 2.0 was shipped out with missing CSS styles for some of the new layouts. I am trying to trouble shoot an issue in ExtJs/GXT since last 5 days :(, frameworks obfuscate a lot of things. I will go with any framework that is absolutely robust and gives appropriate error messages. I haven't worked with others though.

Answer 4

I'm personally tired of browser inconsistencies. If someone else has solved the problem, I'd rather not do it again. That's why I'm getting more interested in front ends like cappuccino and qooxdoo. They are a zero-HTML zero-CSS solution.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

We are using Grails+ExtJS here. Since we try to make an idiomatic ExtJS application, Grails is not fully utilized, though it still makes sense to use Grails instead of, say, JSP, for the server-side part.

Why ExtJS: Because it's a very rich toolkit for GUI-like web applications. Our job is to replace an old Motif GUI, so this is exactly what we need.

Why Grails: Because it gets the job done easily and quickly. For the communication with the ExtJS part, we need a lot of JSON, and in Grails it's like that:

import foo.bar.FooBar
class FooBarController {
    def viewFooBars = {
        def list = FooBar.getList(session.userId, params.foo, params.bar)

        def result = [resultset: list] as JSON

        response.setHeader('Content-disposition', 'filename="json"')
        response.contentType = "text/json";
        render result
    }
}

And that's even two or three lines more than necessary...

Answer 7

Ext GWT has worked well for my project. The premium support has been good.

However the project is for internal use which has allowed deployment to be restricted to one browser on one OS, and no effort has been made to change the default appearance or behaviour of Ext GWT.

Developing entirely within Java is a key benefit as it helps to keep the project manageable as features are added.