You mention the paid support a few times.  Don’t buy it.  The answers you get for the premium support are just as arrogant andcondescending, and they still respond with answers like “why do it that way?” or “you’ll have to prove it.”. A member of my team has found no less than 10 bugs in their API, which they promise to fix in nightly builds, but don’t always follow through on.

Let’s talk other extras too. The charting package or analytical package.  Guess what, for several hundred dollars you get a charting package that 1. Doesn’t graph negative numbers, 2.Doesn’t allow for customization of axis labels.  Really useful right?

I have been using this product for almost aIyar, and I would have abandoned it given the time for a rewrite.  Please if you’re reading this stay away from Isomorphic.  Like theauthor said, it looks like a gift, but it is far from being that.  You will do better with another library or even, dare I say it, Flash!

At the beginning we had big problems with the data source concept. Because of this we implemented our own custom data sources (jpa with database). After doing this everything worked fine for our use cases.

Again, SmartGWT is a powerful framework but compared to other commercial frameworks the documentation IS definately bad. The first weeks are very hard to learn because of this documentation lack. After some time you learn the good and the “bad” things of SmartGWT.

You should definately have a look at SmartGWT.

The relevant except is right here, at the bottom of this post:
http://blog.isomorphic.com/?p=227

I should also point out, you can extend the XML descriptor with your own properties, and you can dynamically provide the XML descriptor to the system as well. So even if you perceive a need to put any kind of redundant information into XML (honestly we’ve never seen such a use case), you can easily provide the information dynamically and eliminate that redundancy.

My apologies if this is an incorrect assessment, but it would be very simple to convince everyone here:

1. can you point to just one instance of a standalone test you provided that demonstrated a bug that wasn’t fixed? Because we very often provide overnight fixes for bugs, even if the user reporting it doesn’t have support

2. if there is any sample that doesn’t work outside of the showcase, congratulations on being the first ever to find it! Can you point out which one?

3. there’s a huge number of Showcase samples related to dynamically generated and data bound forms – in fact I’m not clear what you could mean by this since all the samples show Java code – so it’s all dynamic already? I’m not sure how anyone could have worked with our product at all and say something like this – could you clarify?

4. the tree allows duplicate nodes, just not duplicate node ids. On a number of projects we’ve dealt easily with duplicate nodes, I’m not sure how you ended up with “monstrous” code, but I feel pretty confident a simplification was available. If you can share details, I can help.