GWT vs GXT which is better?

Question

We are trying to port existing thick client to thin client. We are looking at the different technologies, We are trying out different options. We tried GXT as well as GWT in our sample excercises. Which one do you think we should go ahead with? Are there any other better frameworks?

Solution 1

There are many web frameworks available apart from gwt and gxt. There is Vaadin, Dart and many more.

GWT is the foundation of gxt and vaadin. Which technology you want to use depends on your application requirements.

GWT is great in terms of performance but not so good with looks GXT and Vaadin which are built on GWT provide more rich features, more widgets, good in terms of UI and lags in performance.

Solution 2

It's several years I work with GWT (but not GXT). I'm using free version of SmartGWT which is a framework based on a google web toolkit (like GXT).
I personally think if you want (& you have enough reasons) to use GWT, then its a wise choice to use a framework above it such as GXT or SmartGWT or others. This frameworks provide a lot of abilities & ready widgets which make development progress so easy & fun, but they have also their own disadvantages, such as increasing your client side js code size, incompatibility with some browsers, execution overhead which may increase response time a little & so on.
Anyway, beside all weaknesses, I believe that it worth to use them & so I suggest you to USE a GWT-based framework, but before choosing one, take care about these notes:

• development community, their activeness & speed of adapting with new releases of JDK, GWT & specially new versions of browsers & availability of samples, resources & discussion forums
• the variety of provided widgets & ease of coding for developing new softwares
• the ability to customize widgets
• the ability to integrating with the other technologies & widgets from other similar frameworks
• supported development IDEs
• & finally the license & pricing

Solution 3

The decision of framework depends on your requirement. The factors that may influence to selection of framework may vary based on how large product you are going to develop.

Factores mainly include,

• The time for learning.
• Supporting libraries/plugins.
• Fearures Supported.
• Development time.
• Support forums.

As I have done some research with GWT and GXT as well. Time to learn GWT is more. GXT has more number of widgets.

see this .for performance of GWT vs GXT. For a commercial and large product deveploment the decision to choose GWT,GXT depands on requirements. There are lots of other frameworks.

• vaadin
• dwr
• ZK
• Apache Click
• Apache Wicket
• Apache Tapestry 5
• Ariba Web