I never gave Vaadin a try but looking at it for a long time and it’s pleasant to see talented people keeping the good work on the road, congratulations for its improvements over time. I’m also glad to see that Vaadin is, little by little, closing the gap with ZK. Push is finally coming which is good news.
Well, first, it has to be proved, second, it’s a lot easier when the widgets are available . Advanced widgets are available into ZK, i didn’t really see them into Vaadin. Maybe i didn’t look the same showcases as the people saying that :bashful:
Third, i like the GWT approach but in practise, if i want my user not coming back, it’s a good idea to use GWT widgets as they’re everything except appealing… until someone deliver a good quality gwt widget kit. Anyway, can we use GWT designer in any way with Vaadin ?
Ok but where are the advantages ? For example, David Kilmer exposed here valuable reasons why XML-based composition has also its advantages.
So why ZK has more numerous sophisticated widgets ? In terms of widgets and as i see, ZK is nearly comparable with ext GWT and smartGWT. Vaadin is not (yet i hope) in the same “world”. By the way, i didn’t see mobile target in vaadin as we have it in extjs, ZK and SmartGWT [i’m not sure to well understand by apparently Vaadin 6.6 would begin the mobile support, to verify as it seems the need of the pro account]
Ah, i have to give a better look into this, that would be excellent news to see the valuable components we see into ZK, i’m dying to see them as i’m currently searching reasons to dive into Vaadin instead of ZK; and widgets are among the things difficult to ignore except when killing features are available in one product and not in the other. For example, if Vaadin applications could work on a cluster automatically and without additional work, that is the zero-state scalability like we have into SmartGWT and soon in Wicket, then i would care less of widgets and would be ready to completly forget ZK :love: . By the way, will we see a visual builder like ZK studio ? (Apparently a visual designer is mentionned in the roadmap)
Yes, nothing to say here, that’s a clear very important Vaadin advantage… Except one thing take into account Vaadin commercial add-on and it seems Vaadin is finally more expensive, i didn’t check for ZK but i’m pretty sure Vaadin would be much more expensive than smartgwt :bored: that left me pensive 8o
Both Vaadin and ZK allow building dynamic web app into one page so some would say that SEO needs would be irrelevant, i would not agree :), not natural yes, but irrelevant, no. By the way, ZK is SEO friendly :P. As GWT is not friendly with SEO needs, i guess Vaadin is not adapted too.
Final note : in fact the thing that would be bun and would calm down the widget debate, is to support LGPL Smart Gwt as an add-on, that is the client side. By the way, that would cover much of the missing points of this comparison table http://www.smartclient.com/product/competition.jsp and instead of only framework competition, it would be by part framework collaboration even if on the competion side, Vaadin with such an add-on would become better than ZK or extGWT :smug:.