Dear SmartGWT team,
First of all congratulations on a framework that seems very potent, and a very impressive showcase. That something that really gets a developers attention!
I've spend the last week trying out SmartGWT, and I must admit that it's not a walk in the park. I've been through the FAQ and spending a lot of time reading posts here on the forum, and it appears to me that you're take pride in NOT documenting the use of the framework? Whenever people ask a simple question, they are refered to the FAQ - but it often seems they've already consulted the FAQ, so it would appear that it's not good enough?
It took me a quite while to figure out where to extract enough information to piece a working example together, reading the FAQ, Javadocs and looking at sourcecode in the showcase.
And I really don't understand why you insist on making it such a nuisance? You have something to be proud of here. Why not make it comprehensible in an glanse by collecting the necessary documention ONE place, and making a couple of tutorials?
I'm sure that it wouldn't take that long for a skilled SmartGWT developer to piece a good tutorial + documentation together. Compared to the time that new developers use to get started, it seems worth the efford. Especially the concept of datasources, dynamicforms, fields are not very clear when comming from other GUI frameworks. Also a compendium of all the gui-components, layout and their use whould be nice. It's simply takes too long to browse through the showcase examples for a suitable piece of code.
I belive you're loosing a lot of potential uses because the learning curve is too steep.
Best of luck!
Hans
First of all congratulations on a framework that seems very potent, and a very impressive showcase. That something that really gets a developers attention!
I've spend the last week trying out SmartGWT, and I must admit that it's not a walk in the park. I've been through the FAQ and spending a lot of time reading posts here on the forum, and it appears to me that you're take pride in NOT documenting the use of the framework? Whenever people ask a simple question, they are refered to the FAQ - but it often seems they've already consulted the FAQ, so it would appear that it's not good enough?
It took me a quite while to figure out where to extract enough information to piece a working example together, reading the FAQ, Javadocs and looking at sourcecode in the showcase.
And I really don't understand why you insist on making it such a nuisance? You have something to be proud of here. Why not make it comprehensible in an glanse by collecting the necessary documention ONE place, and making a couple of tutorials?
I'm sure that it wouldn't take that long for a skilled SmartGWT developer to piece a good tutorial + documentation together. Compared to the time that new developers use to get started, it seems worth the efford. Especially the concept of datasources, dynamicforms, fields are not very clear when comming from other GUI frameworks. Also a compendium of all the gui-components, layout and their use whould be nice. It's simply takes too long to browse through the showcase examples for a suitable piece of code.
I belive you're loosing a lot of potential uses because the learning curve is too steep.
Best of luck!
Hans
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