General Questions about SmartGWT

[crisi]

Hi there

I'm about to find out if SmartGWT is the right choice for a software we'd like to build. But before i can do that i need some questions to be answered :)

- I saw that SmartGWT can connect to several SQL DBMS, is it also able to connect to an Oracle DB? Would this work with Hibernate?
- Is it correct that SmarGWT has exact the same features as SmartClient? I thought there's only SmartGWT and SmartGWT EE. What about Pro and Power versions, they exist as well?
- When i deployed the SmartGWT Showcase to a local Tomcat server and started the Visual Builder i wasn't able to save a project. (Nothing happened when i clicked the save button)
- What's the best way to implement the VB when working with Eclipse?
- Is there a way to design the printing output of the pages generated?
- If Phones or Handhelds support JavaScript can they run a SmartGWT app?
- The creation of PDFs, i guess, can be done by a library?

I know this are a lot of questions and i've been reading a lot of SmartGWT articles etc. and still, not everything is clear to me, so i would be very thankful for some answers =)

Thank you in advance, crisi

[Isomorphic]

1. Yes, Oracle is supported with both the SQL connector and Hibernate connector

2. Yes, SmartClient and SmartGWT are parallel product lines with equivalent free and commercial editions. See this overview.

3. A couple of users have reported this, and we believe it's corrected in the latest nightlies.

4. Use it separately. Use the DataSource wizards for common types of databinding, and grab the saved XML files they produce from your deployment directory under the "ds" directory (configurable via server.properties), copy them to your Eclipse project under the same directory, and load them with the DataSourceLoader servlet (see how the sample projects do this).

Saved screen designs can be loaded into your page using a <script src=> tag pointing to a .jsp file that uses the <isomorphic:xml> JSP tag to produce JavaScript from the XML tag. Then in your SGWT code, use Canvas.getByID() to obtain the components defined in the XML.

If having separate screen definitions in XML is not useful to you architecturally, you may be better off just creating screens in Java. However, the DataSource wizards are extremely useful regardless.

5. Need to clarify "design"

6. Yes, support is not yet complete, if you run into any issues consider using Feature Sponsorship or consulting time to have them addressed

7. Yes, third party libraries are commonly used for this.