A few posts back, I discussed my new project, an online quiz application, and the initial choice of GWT and GXT as the framework. The article was entitled “Pigs are Flying”, due to my previous convictions and statements that were not always kind to so called Rich Internet Applications.

Well it turns out after all that pigs do not fly and GWT/GXT does not fly.

A few caveats here. I use GWT daily in my consulting gig, so I have some experience in the area. I just remain a firm believer in applying Ajax judiciously. GWT (and certainly GXT) is full blown Ajax, almost HTML-less Ajax, if that is possible.

I still stand by the heuristic that an RIA will take twice as long to develop as the comparably functional Ajax-enhanced HTML application. Does this type of application have a place? Most definitely. Just be certain you requirements dictate such a tool and you have the funding and or time for its implement. In my situation, I just did not have such a luxury, particularly to wait around for applications to reload changes and to search out documentation on a less than fully documented third party framework.

Nuff said on that issue.

Since I’ve always been a user of Spring, and I initially started prototyping the quiz app in Spring MVC, I returned to SpringSource technologies, but not Spring but Grails.

I may have a little to say about Grails in the future (and I don’t like to repeat what is already said out there) but Grails is truly excellent.

While pigs are not flying anymore (although they are trying to take off, since I’ve also had some less than kind things to say about dynamic languages) there is still much to get used to in a language like Groovy. I specifically mean the lack of static type checking. However, IntelliJ does a decent job with things like code completion. Plus the dynamic application reloading is great. It’s nice not to hit the restart button after every code change.

That’s it for the status update. I’ll return to discussing performance issues in future articles. I find it hard not to get sidetracked when the topic of framework selection and evaluation arises.