SmartGWT custom skin live websites?

[ohmi]

Can I get pointers to SmartGWT/SmartClient websites/apps that truly exploit the CSS/custom skinning capabilities? By that I mean, do not look/feel like the Isomorphic Showcase or basic GWT samples, but more like Twitter.com, for example.

I am not disparaging the Showcase by any means, but we need a UI/skin that is much less industrial, more streamlined/fun although rich with controls, grids, etc. We're not sure if what smartGWT offers is adequate. So, any feedback from UI designers who have tried to do this is appreciated.

I see that Isomorphic offers consulting services. Can they point to a 3rd-party site that has the kind of look and feel I'm trying to describe?

Thank you very much.

[NewSmartGWTGuy]

I too would like to see some examples of real deployments. Professional designers integrating this library into a company's look and feel.

There's no question the functionality of smartclient/gwt is awesome, but I'm having a hard time finding great UI designs based on the library. Does this mean it's main place is in the intranet portal realm?

Using a pull down to change the colors of the buttons is great for an intranet, but for a customer facing site that is not what I have in mind..

Building a mockup of mint.com (which is in flash), with this library would be an example. Basically something both functional and beautiful.

[Isomorphic]

This has been asked and answered a number of times - note how the forum provides you links to threads with the same question, at the bottom.

To re-explain, SmartGWT is used for enterprise applications and certain complex consumer applications (like Intuit). Although it has been skinned extensively to match various requirements, you cannot typically access such applications without signing up, paying, or talking to a sales rep.

And again, if you want a radically different look and feel and want to drive as much as possible via CSS, start with the Simplicity skin, but realize you won't get full quality on IE8 and earlier (or even in IE9 for many things).

[NewSmartGWTGuy]

Yes, I have seen a similar response before. I not trying to belabor the point, in fact I wish there was a simpler way to compare frameworks.

Thus far I'm extremely impressed with the server side components, data binding, rich client widgets, and other features. In general, it looks like this framework has more functionality and is easier to use than extJS and certainly jQuery. It even has more functionality than Flex.

The trouble is that there do exist examples of extJS, jQuery, and Flex being radically transformed to fit into the UIX needs of their deployments.

So 'start with simplicity theme' gives me a path for further exploration, but certainly doesn't help me come to a quick(er) final decision. Now i'm going to need to spend additional time (likely days) seeing if that is sufficient.

As HTML5 deployments become more popular (we're still relatively early in rich-web-client adoption), you're likely to have many more such as myself evaluating this framework against other alternatives. Having at least one truly 'different' example of what can be done would just really help. Moving an entire team of people to a new framework is a big deal for a company, involving the up-front licensing costs and more substantially, the opportunity costs of making a wrong decision.

[Isomorphic]

It sounds as though you've probably only seen the 4 skins in the online showcase. There's a second smartgwt-skins.jar in the SDK with more skins, and there's the online customer showcase with several more examples of drastic change.

These should make it obvious that mint.com is less radical than what has already been achieved many times. If you still have concerns, be specific.

[NewSmartGWTGuy]

Hello again,

I downloaded smartclient (js) into an existing Apache 7 server into /ROOT and everything works great. I swapped to the Simplicity skin and that worked too.

Now, I would like to take the demoApp and pull it into a new project /demoApp. I copied 'images', 'isomorphic', 'shared', and 'WEB-INF' as well as the jsp/js files into the root. I run 'localhost/demoApp/demoAppJS.jsp'

I can get 'hello world' running just fine, but as soon as i try to run the demoApp I get a java error. I searched the forums and I see this referenced, but not a specific solution as to how to fix it. I assume a path is wrong somewhere, but the logged error message doesn't tell me anything useful as to how to fix it.

BTW: Do you publish source for the tag library? I could probably debug the issue easily if I could attach a debugger to it.

ov 9, 2011 5:25:05 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve invoke
SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet [jsp] in context with path [/demoApp] threw exception [javax.servlet.ServletException: javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.ArrayList cannot be cast to java.util.Map
	at com.isomorphic.datasource.BasicDataSource.buildFieldData(BasicDataSource.java:662)
	at com.isomorphic.datasource.BasicDataSource.init(BasicDataSource.java:218)
	at com.isomorphic.sql.SQLDataSource.init(SQLDataSource.java:151)
...

thanks

[Isomorphic]

You skipped several installation steps. See "Deploying SmartClient" in the Reference.