GXT speed still not as good as extjs native

[gab77]

Hello Darrell,

Thank you very much for you great work and probably the richest palette of functions in GWT library. I see the progress in GXT. Every day there are changes in the code base. GXT 1.2 is faster and robouster as the previous versions.

But when I launch the explorer example and start to click one thumbnail after another (trying to open all of them) I have the feeling that the speed experience is not as good as GWT-EXT. Some Tabs are not opening instantly. For example "Grid Plugins" you have to wait a while. Another example "Advanced Tabs"- when you click on the "Add Tab" button wildly to add many Tabs the tabs are not opening so smoothly as in GWT-EXT, and the scrolling behavior is not as nice.

Maybe these are not the most popular use cases in the real world applications but there is in my opinion easy recognizable difference in the feel of the UI.
Am I alone here who is thinking like this? Or are there other guys who see the problem similar?

Darrell, how about opinions in your extjs Team? What are saying your team colleagues from extjs library when they are looking at your results. Do you see this as a problem? Are you working on that?

You have the embedded extjs Code in the com.extjs.gxt.ui.client.core.Ext class. Is it impossible to achieve the same effects in GXT as we have in native Extjs?

I would be grateful if you could give some feedback.

Best regards,
Gabriel.

PS. I have tested under Vista Business 64 bit. Intel Core 2 Quad 2,4. 8 GB RAM. Browsers: FF3, IE 7, and Chrome

[gslender]

I personally think the two frameworks take a completely different approach and therefore have benefits and disadvantages because of this.

ExtGWT it a true GWT widget library and leverages the power and flexiblity of being just that. Obviously the integration between creating a DOM element within GWT and ExtGWT is very similar as they are doing the same thing, making the same calls. Debugging problems with ExtGWT is really simple, you can see exactly what is being done to the DOM within Java, and its easy to understand what might be happening.

A disadvantage of this approach is that most widgets seems to rely on DOM.appendChild or DOM.createChild which is known to be a tad slow... (see http://techzone.enterra-inc.com/?p=25) I'd suggest that further improvements might be possible (by either ExtGWT or GWT) and so I'd guess this will improve over time. I think the TabItem inserts could benefits from optimisation but I guess in terms of overall importance, I'm not concerned given that most applications perform truly fast enough as they are.

GWT-Ext it a GWT wrapper around a JavaScript library and leverages the power and flexiblity of ExtJS. Obviously the integration between GWT and ExtJS can be an issue, and problems in ExtJS are going to be trickier to solve and debug (unless you love crawling around ExtJS without a debugger).

A advantage of this approach is that you can get instant access to years of experience in fine tuning and optimising JavaScript widgets - clearly this is the current pinicale in getting the most out of JavaScript.

Future <yoda> Mmmm, hard to predict the future it is... </yoda> As, at some point, JavaScript will become more advanced and Google and others will start to produce GWT compilers that take instant advantage of that. Things like increasing the number of HTTP connect threads, a true multi-threaded UI, perhaps even enhanced JavaScript byte-code optimisation (eg if you are building with GWT, surely the Google Chrome Browser can do something better than just parse plain JavaScript - why not drop in some special "Chrome codes" that blindingly compile this section into super-optimised native code?)

Overall, I'd question whether inserting 100 tab items super-fast is really a problem you'll have to contend with, or will you need to get down and dirty into the code base to work out why some layout or widget render is not working they way you need - which of these two is more likely to occur?

My 2 cents...

cheers,
grant

[cravemusic]

Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but seeing the UI slowdown like you describe is going to be highly dependent on your browser, as some JS engines are better than others. This is especially noticeable with the very complex widgets like grids, because the amount of code to make those widgets functional is much higher than the code to generate the calendar on a Date field.