Basics

Relationship to SmartGWT

In contrast to SmartGWT, which is a GWT adapter around the native JavaScript SmartClient library, SmartGWT.mobile is a completely new framework written almost entirely in GWT, with JSNI used only in snippets where required to communicate with the mobile browser. This means that SmartGWT.mobile data structures are visible to the debugger in GWT dev mode, and as the library is both a GWT module and open-source under the GNU LGPL, the debugger can step through all of the client-side logic.

The SmartGWT.mobile API is designed to be very similar to that of SmartGWT, but it exists in a parallel package structure (com.smartgwt.mobile.client instead of com.smartgwt.client), and many of the more visually complicated or heavyweight components of SmartGWT are not replicated, nor are many attributes (particularly on DataSource and data-bound components) that simply mirror SmartClient settings and are not applicable to a mobile environment. SmartGWT.mobile supports only DataSources that communicate via JSON-REST, and projects adding a SmartGWT.mobile client to an existing SmartGWT or SmartClient application using the IDACall servlet will need to add the restapi servlet as described in the SmartGWT.mobile user guide.

Limitations

SmartGWT.mobile applications look and behave primarily like iOS applications, but they work on the default Android browser, and the default History functionality makes the Android back button behave mostly as expected for Android users.  SmartGWT.mobile is known not to work on the Android or desktop versions of Firefox.

SmartGWT.mobile provides UI components and data binding; it does not include such features as integration with the native contact list. These capabilities may be accessed by also including other GWT libraries in the application.