Vaadin Touchkit or mgwt

Question

I am evaluating possibilities to create mobile hybrid Apps with GWT and Apache Cordova / PhoneGap. I already build a small prototype with mgwt and liked it, but I would like to research a few other possibilities before starting the project. Therefore I took a look at Vaadin and its AddOn Touchkit.

I have the following questions:

1. Is it possible to use the Vaadin Touchkit Addon in a Client-Side Application which does not need a permanent server connection?

   In the mobile chapter of the documentation an example is shown that is a Server-Side Application, as far as I understand it and therefore would need a server connection for each UI event. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I have no experience with Vaadin.

2. Is there any difference between a "normal" GWT App and a Client-Side Vaadin App?

3. Does it has any advantages to use Vaadin Touchkit instead of mgwt?

4. In general is Vaadin Touchkit comparable to mgwt and if yes which are the main differences?

Answer 1

1. You can build a Vaadin TouchKit applications that work offline. The "Parking Demo" shows this: http://demo.vaadin.com/parking/ (Source code here : https://github.com/vaadin/parking-demo) By default, default the application is online, but for the data entry the app uses offline (client-side-only) approach.

2. If you are building a client-side Vaadin app you would still use the TouchKit widgets. Until version 3 TouchKit widgets have followed the iOS native widgets, but v4 introduces new styles that are more device agnostic and better suitable also for Android devices.

3. The most prominent difference (and advantage, if you wish) of Vaadin TouchKit is however the default server-side programming approach. It is very quick to build mobile optimized web applications - especially if you already have an existing Java web application and business logic in place. For client-side apps the visible difference is the look-and-feel of the Touchkit and mgwt widgets.

4. Generally this is also where it boils down to: If you are quite ok to have parts of the application running online (data on server) and need the offline-mode is only needed for some parts of application, Vaadin TouchKit is very quick and efficient way to build decent looking apps. On the other hand, mgwt gives you direct start on the client-side-only applications and is maybe better optimized for that.

You had already found out that both suffer from the sandboxing of HTML5 applications. While camera and location APIs are available a solution like phonegap is still needed to really integrate with the device and match native applications.