Experience: Migration-Paths

[Dekker67]

Hi

I am evaluating SmartClient. So far I like very much what I see.

There are 4 questions which no starter guide can answer. It would be nice if people with a "long term" experience could answer the following questions:

1. How easy/troublesome is the migration path from SmartClient version to the next SmartClient version (Is the API stable? How often will code break?)

2. How helpful is the company / forum?

3. How quick are bugs fixed?

4. If you have experience with ExtJS: What are the strong points of ExtJS over SmartClient? Which one would you prefer and why?

--> I have seen those 2 Links:

----> EXTJS comparison (2006): http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=2678

---->Comparison: http://www.smartclient.com/product/competition.jsp


Thanks in advance,
Marco

[jaredm]

Hi Marco,

I've been working with SmartClient since 2009 when I was an independent consultant and introduced the framework at several clients I worked at.

1. API is stable, backwards browser support is something Isomorphic seem to pride themselves on. There have been a few times I've had to refactor things early on but those were mostly due to not following best-practices to begin with.

2. The company is helpful and so are the forums. They do seem to be a tiny bit short-tempered when it comes to forum requests that aren't backed up by enough information for them to be able to resolve. On the one hand this is understandable, I think every techie has felt that frustration in their career - on the other hand it sometimes doesn't come across as particularly professional.

3. My experience is, if you can get them a reproducible sample then stuff gets fixed rapidly. Delays are mainly down to them not being able to replicate issues.

4. I don't use ExtJS, I have used jQuery/Dojo and some others. I love it for the documentation, for the fact that once you understand how things are glued together then it makes a whole lot of sense and the code is very well written and documented nicely. If you need a 'light' DOM or a non-JS interface then you need to look at something else but otherwise SmartClient is a great choice.

[Dekker67]

@jaredm: Thanks a lot for your answer, which was very insightful.