is smartGWT really as slow as its showcase is?

Question

I've started implementing my web application using smartGWT. Is it really as slow as it is on the showcase?

It's practically unreasonably slow.

I'm in a new empty project that all it does it display a modal window with a login form in onLoad.

this takes about 1 full minute to load.

I think it's just waiting for something and then poof it's loaded.

I'm running it from eclipse, just clicking the green run button.

Answer 1

Initially Smartgwt will take a long time to load in client's browser because it downloads 2mb of javascript files. But performancewise it is not slow because smartgwt layouts are based on divs, but GWT layouts are based on tables.

The drawbacks of SmartGWT are:

1. Downloads lot of javascript files.
2. There is no image bundles used in smartgwt. Browser will make lot of requests for images. For a single button smartgwt uses 9 images.
3. Customization is difficult. Applying our own css style is bit difficult compare to GWT.

Features:

1. Datasource
2. Existing attractive widgets
3. Implementing animations are easy

So using smartGWT is depends on your requirement.If you have more time you can develop with GWT. If you have less time and you have to develop a big application use smartGWT.

Answer 2

Edit: this user was running in GWT hosted mode, which is 10x or more slower than compiled mode. So he was not experiencing an actual performance issue.

We see people complain that their own (flawed) deployments are slow but not usually about the Showcase itself. Most likely, you've got your browser configured for development or have tools installed that are slowing things down.

First, see if you have set your browser to non-default cache settings (such as "check every time"). This could cause images to be repeatedly re-requested. You can see this if you open the "Net" panel in Firebug, or with IE, use a tool like Fiddler.

However, about Firebug, Firebug and similar development tools greatly slows down the performance of the browser and leaks a great deal of memory. To see the Showcase how a normal end user would see it, disable Firebug and restart your browser in case it has been leaking memory.