One RIA Framework to Rule Them All

I took some time on this holiday break to start experimenting with Silverlight and Flex, neither of which I have any experience with. While I was toying around with them I started thinking about the dizzying number of the RIA framework options.

With Silverlight I really liked developing in Visual Studio, it was intuitive and fast. I also liked that fact that I could use XAML to markup the layout, then back it up with C# for the event handling.

Flex looks good too. I especially like the fact that you can mark up your presentation in an XML format (MXML), similar to XAML. I am not a fan of ActionScript though, but I will have to see how east the IDE makes editing the code when I get that far.

Then there is GWT. Well, I liked that so much that I wrote a book about it. I like the fact that I can used my editor of choice (Eclipse), code in Java, and it is open and free.

I once used Ext-JS on a large project, and although it looked great it was extremely painful. When I got done the code was completely unmaintainable.

I have also dealt with Scriptaculous, Prototype, DWR, and other tools over the years, but for smaller projects that probably can't be considered RIAs.

Then there is Wicket, Echo2, blah, blah, blah... so many to choose from!

So which is best? I am partial to GWT, mostly because I know it the best, and it is free and has a great community. On the other hand, I could get used to Silverlight (although the cost can be prohibitive).

If you have an opinion I would like to hear it.

GWT-Ext vs. Ext-GWT

If you haven't seen Ext-JS, you should. It is a wicked cool API for JavaScript containing tons of widgets and tools. What immediately attracted were the rich set of attractive widgets that comes with Ext-JS out of the box.

For us GWT developers there is a project that wraps the Ext-JS library for GWT, namely GWT-EXT (GWT before Ext). The initial release was in July of 2007, and since then it encapsulates most of the functionality of Ext-JS.

Now just yesterday something happened that could undermine this project. The same team that developed Ext-JS has now released an initial beta of Ext-GWT (Ext before GWT).

This has got to be a blow to Sanjiv Jivan of the GWT-Ext project, who has undoubtedly given up a lot of his free time for the development of the library. But perhaps it does not have to mean an end for GWT-Ext. The first thing it has going for it is that there are already a lot of developers using it, who may not want to switch to an entirely different set of APIs just because it is the "official" version. Also, on taking a quick glance at Ext-GWT, I already see at least one feature that is missing, and that I can not do without.

For me, I am not sure where I stand. I think that for now I am going to stick with Sanjiv's GWT-Ext, at least until Ext-GWT comes out of beta. And then I will decide based on the stability of each, and which provides the features I need.

What do you think? Is an "official" Ext-GWT really what we needed?