GWT - RIA of Choice ?

I have been evaluating RIA frameworks (incl. Echo 2, GWT, JavaFX and Silverlight) for building business applications since a year ago. So far GWT has come as a clear winner.

GWT is especially appealing to Java developers - you develop your application in Java: server side, client side GUI, the lot. The GUI development is much like Swing, except that you are dealing with GWT APIs, but the programming experience is pretty much the same. AJAX is also supported by simply writing Java callback code without touching any XML or Javascript. These Java code is then translated into high quality and high performance Javascript by GWT and at deployment time, the JS code is downloaded to the browser and gets executed there - freeing the server side from handling presentation responsibilities. (Echo 3 also promised to take a similar approach). When I first learnt and programmed in GWT, it was such a refreshing experience - it was a joy to use.

The GWT team focuses on the foundation of the framework and does not bother with making state-of-the-art cool widgets. That responsibility has been given to third-parties. Sanjiv Jivan has created the wonderful GWT-Ext project which takes on this responsibility. Some people claimed that between GWT and Flex, they chose Flex because of its better look and feel. I guess they did not include GWT-Ext in their picture.

GWT-Ext provides a set of cool and useful widgets with complete documentation, demo and sample applications. It is a tremendous amount of work for an individual to take on. The result is simply superb.

One major issue of GWT-Ext is that it is a GWT wrapper of Ext-JS library, which used to be LGPL and now GPL (since version 2.1) and a commercial license is also available. Apparently this change of licensing policy has created much stir in the community. The effect of this change is also evident in the GWT-Ext distribution - in earlier versions (e.g. v0.9.2) the Ext-JS is bundled with the GWT-Ext download; but in newer ones (e.g. v2.0.3) you have to download and install Ext-JS yourself.

Furthermore, the maker of Ext-JS, Ext also created a similar product called Ext-GWT (not to be confused with GWT-Ext), which directly competes with GWT-Ext. The technical difference between GWT-Ext and Ext-GWT can be found here.

As a commercial application developer, if you want to stick with GWT-Ext, then there are the following choices:

1. use older version of Ext-JS with new version of GWT-Ext for free
2. pay for latest version of Ext-JS but use GWT-Ext for free
3. hope/wait for someone to fork Ext-JS and maintain a LGPL branch

I can't wait to work with GWT-Ext 2.0.3 which has full Drag-and-Drop (DnD) support in its widgets. Note that by DnD I don't mean just repositioning a widget on screen (which many RIA frameworks can do), but the kind of DnD capability that you would expect in Swing or WinForms, e.g. to drag a row in a grid and drop it into a text area so that the text area can be populated with the data from the corresponding business object being DnD'ed.

I hope Sanjiv stays true to the open source ideology, continues with the good work of GWT-Ext and doesn't change the licensing policy.