GXT Performance Issues

Question

Hi All,

We are working on a rather complex system using GXT. While everything works great on FF, IE (especially IE6) is a different story (looking at more than 10 seconds until the browser renders the page).

I understand that one of the main reasons is DOM manipulation which is a disaster under IE6 (See http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/innerhtml.html).

This can be thought to be a generic problem of a front-end Javascript framework (i.e. GWT) but a simple code (see below) that executes the same functionality proofs otherwise. In fact, under IE6 - getSomeGWT() takes 400ms while getSomeGXT() takes 4 seconds. That's a x10 factor which makes a huge different for the user experience !!!

private HorizontalPanel getSomeGWT() {
        HorizontalPanel pointsLogoPanel = new HorizontalPanel();
        for (int i=0; i<350; i++) {
            HorizontalPanel innerContainer = new HorizontalPanel();
            innerContainer.add(new Label("some GWT text"));
            pointsLogoPanel.add(innerContainer);
        }
        return pointsLogoPanel;
    }

    private LayoutContainer getSomeGXT() {
        LayoutContainer pointsLogoPanel = new LayoutContainer();
        pointsLogoPanel.setLayoutOnChange(true);
        for (int i=0; i<350; i++) {
            LayoutContainer innerContainer = new LayoutContainer();
            innerContainer.add(new Text("just some text"));
            pointsLogoPanel.add(innerContainer);
        }
        return pointsLogoPanel;
    }

So to solve/mitigate the issue one would need to - a. Reduce the number of DOM manipulations; or b. Replace them with innerHTML.

AFAIK, (a) is simply a side effect of using GXT and (b) is only possible with UiBinder which isn't supported yet by GXT.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I Pearl,

We have the same problem. Have you got a solution since your last post.

Thanks.

Rich