GWT Mobile Development

Question

I'm looking to build a GWT app targetting mobile browsers. My requirements:

• Mobile friendly widgets which work across all modern browsers including IE, Firefox (not just webkit).

I haven't found any well supported frameworks for doing this.

I've looked at:

• mgwt: Supported by one developer, only works on webkit, no common theme across all browsers
• SmartGWT Mobile: Still in beta, only works on webkit
• jqm4GWT: Not well supported, JQuery Mobile dev doesnt integrate well with GWT

Its a shame as GWT should be very performant for mobile dev compared to server side heavy when bandwidth is slow (e.g. JSF).

Does anyone have any suggestions for mobile dev with GWT? I'm surprised there isn't more demand for mobile GWT given the massive increase in mobile browsing.

Answer 1

I decided to use JQM4GWT with some customization. It's not ideal, but here are some of my opinions:

• The resources behind mGWT are currently too limited compared to JQuery mobile
• mGWT browser support is not really good
• mGWT community is small
• mGWT widgets don't look really good
• I wasn't a big fan of the default theming, and I prefer having a consistent look and feel across all browsers including at desktop browser.

If we look at the resources behind JQuery Mobile and the amount of testing that goes into all the different browsers its hard to compete. There is a huge community reporting bugs which only improves the framework faster and there is a large team working on the development of the framework.

Hopefully Google will devote more resources to mGWT and it can be a competitive framework but I feel in its current state its not mature enough and its much safer using JQM4GWT for the immediate future.

Answer 2

Interesting development, Daniel Kurka shared a couple of weeks ago that he has been hired by Google. This could be a real boost for mgwt. https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/mgwt/SKcQp408RDg