I have been working with
LGPL version Isomorphic SmartClient framework currently. For those who don’t
know it, SmartClient is primarily a JavaScript framework which allows you to
build "Enterprise Grade" web applications. And it is quite true as
well. In the following lines, I would
like to present it pros and cons which may prove useful for some of my reader.
Let me start with Pros.
Pros.
Controls Library with Extensive Functionalities
SmartClient makes
developer's life a lot easier (if he/she knows her way around...let me come
back to it) when building web applications that require components with
extensive functionalities for information display, such as Grids, Charts ,
Forms that support context menus, sorting , filter , validation, highlighting etc.
(such as a dashboard). For example, the
grid itself is feature packed. You can sort, filter and highlight rows as well
as create custom cell contain buttons and images. You can freeze columns, use data source to
change grid data on the fly without much effort and use context menu to allow
users to perform actions on data in the grid. Form controls are great too. For
example, you can restrict user to numeric input, display a extensive set of
data as grid in the dropdown of a combo box and control positioning on form
quite well.
Quicker Development
SmartClient client supports
a very simple object based design to build UI.
There are controls and there are controls that contain them. For example,
in order to build a form, you just create a form object, and objects of each
control that you want on that form and just add them to the form. This is not only easier to understand when
you are learning it for the first time (compared to ExtJS where you also need
to know about MVC and have to deal with complex naming conventions). The extensive feature set of each control
allows you to write less code and get more done.
Cons.
Documentation
I can easily describe how I
feel about its documentation... It’s pretty weak. Though the documentation is not only
available with SDK as well as online, it is sparse if you take into
consideration the feature rich controls.
There is no description of how each control has been built; you just
have to figure it out yourself. The
documentation just lists the attributes and methods of each control along with
brief descriptions for each of them. For
example, if you want to fill a combo box with text from a cell of its dropdown
list, the documentation gives you no clear indication on how to go about doing
that. You will just have to connect dots by experimenting with the control and
significantly digging through documentation.
It is important to mention here that SmartClient has different version.
The LGPL version just contains JavaScript, while versions above it allow these
controls to be rendered through JAVA (GWT).
So, in my case, I was only utilizing a portion of documentation, and I
clearly felt that the JavaScript portion of the documentation should have been
as big as the documentation itself.
Also, the examples were a bit misleading for me, as most of them either
used static data, or fetched data from the server through a URL. This gave me a
false sense that data binding was not a big issue, however, in reality, when
using dynamic data built on client's browser; I had to figure it out. However, the good thing is that examples
render themselves for modification and you can build a prototype of what you
want to build before making any kind of commitments.
Loading
Because of its extensive
nature, SmartClient takes noticeable time to render. The controls, when they load are not as
snappy as some of the lightweight UI controls are, but given their utility it
was acceptable for me. In other cases of
course, this compromise depends upon the requirements and preferences.
UI and its customization
I don’t know, it may be because of ease of UI control, but SmartClient is
not div based. It extensively uses tables for building UI structure. Also, there is a particular and extensive
procedure to customizing its CSS. Doing CSS customization the normal way, may
result in some unexpected and previously unseen results, and although it is
very much doable, it would just take more time.
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