<narrative>
the data management aspects of smartgwt seemed nice enough to take a look. we hacked together some datasources with listgrids and a custom rest-based servlet. it worked well enough to proceed cautiously.
then i added a button, and the label was displayed in a completely different panel. then i added an accordian, but although following the relatively simple examples in the showcase, just can't get it to paint correctly (it only shows one section, but when clicked repeatedly will show the actual items... but in an unusable way). ok, i thought, it's probably because i'm adding the accordian widget to a gwt panel control... not a smartgwt-native layout thingy. so i proceed to rip out all my panels and replace them with layouts, but to no avail. ultimately, i dug far enough down to realize that smartgwt doesn't even use the rootPanel concept, but rather a .draw method to plug in the juice and make things paint.
</narrative>
so my question is, how do you recommend that i truly integrate smartgwt with vanilla gwt? must i rip it all apart and use layouts from the start with the .draw mechanism? can i only have gwt widgets on a smartgwt foundation, but not vice-versa? what are the subtleties behind addChild versus addMember? I find one place where it explains managed versus unmanaged, but what is that specifically? am i rolling the dice to try to use one-off smartgwt controls in my gwt app? why don't these toolkits play better together? what am i missing? what should i read to get educated?
thanks in advance for any guidance.
the data management aspects of smartgwt seemed nice enough to take a look. we hacked together some datasources with listgrids and a custom rest-based servlet. it worked well enough to proceed cautiously.
then i added a button, and the label was displayed in a completely different panel. then i added an accordian, but although following the relatively simple examples in the showcase, just can't get it to paint correctly (it only shows one section, but when clicked repeatedly will show the actual items... but in an unusable way). ok, i thought, it's probably because i'm adding the accordian widget to a gwt panel control... not a smartgwt-native layout thingy. so i proceed to rip out all my panels and replace them with layouts, but to no avail. ultimately, i dug far enough down to realize that smartgwt doesn't even use the rootPanel concept, but rather a .draw method to plug in the juice and make things paint.
</narrative>
so my question is, how do you recommend that i truly integrate smartgwt with vanilla gwt? must i rip it all apart and use layouts from the start with the .draw mechanism? can i only have gwt widgets on a smartgwt foundation, but not vice-versa? what are the subtleties behind addChild versus addMember? I find one place where it explains managed versus unmanaged, but what is that specifically? am i rolling the dice to try to use one-off smartgwt controls in my gwt app? why don't these toolkits play better together? what am i missing? what should i read to get educated?
thanks in advance for any guidance.
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