I was wondering if Isomorphic has plans to make their SmartClient server open source. Doing so, there are so many benefits Isomophic could reap. There are many commercial products out there that ultimately chose this option and are benefiting greatly. To name a few JasperSoft, JBoss, MySQL, Postgress, Red Hat, Terracotta.
The benefits that come with open sourcing SmartClient include:
Feature enrichtment
The best ideas always reside outside of your company. Contribution from the community would include implementing great features
into SmartClient server.
Bug fixes
Many people would be able to contribute to fix bugs at a far faster rate.
Documentation
For documentation Isomorphic have the Javadoc, the Quick start guide, the reference and the massive show case samples. To be honest, this seems complete. But the problem is that information is scattered every where. Sometimes I face a certain problem and get the feeling that I have seen this somewhere in the doucmentation. But which one and where? No clue anymore. I would then have to go and dig into the docs again, which sometimes takes me like an hour. I think there must be one major documentation where the most frequently used features are described. And the open source community can be utilized fruitfully here. People of the cummunity are keen on writing tutorials about issues they solved that took a lot of effort, with the hope that others who fall into the same trap could follow their tutorials to get out.
Forum participation
What I have noticed on the forum is that the most questions are answered by user “Isomorphic”. User Isomorphic chooses which questions to answer and which ones to ignore. Because knowledge is limited to Isomorphic only and due to the fact that it’s a closed source product, when they choose to ignore questions there is no one else who can answer. I think this is bad thing for the product. I also don’t believe people are going to buy support by this action. You also don’t grow your user base this way.
A question I posed recently in the forum is ONLY one example of that. Assumming the source were to be available, I could have figured it out myself by looking at the source code. No answer and no source code means going to do trial and error for serveral hours or days. Maybe with some luck I could find the right solution otherwise I choose a different option.
Framework popularity
I think SmartClient is a great product and deserves more exposure. By open sourcing it, you would grow the user base exponentially which in turn could make your commercial ambitions more viable.
As mentioned above, there are many commercial companies that ultimately choose the open source path and are doing good. So why can’t Isomorphic too?
My ( I have a Pro license) own frustration with Isomorphic is that they have modeled their support licensing fees in accordance with $1B+ institutions and thus has become ridiculously expensive for people like us with companies who don’t have such revenues. Googling around I even found that there are paid support users out there who ain’t getting value for their money on support. See this interesting discussions going on here: http://java.dzone.com/articles/lessons-learned-smartgwt-23-–
It’s easy to vote for things to become free. The reality is that the open source project exists and has the quality level it has because of purchases of the commercial version.
Similarly, our support prices are not based on specific budgets but on the costs of providing staff who can answer arbitrary questions on such a large product, and providing a level of service where every found bug is fixed.
The dzone article you linked to is from someone who declined to purchase support and the comment are likewise from people who declined to purchase support. A quick browse of the forums will reveal many glowing comments from people who have purchased support. We certainly agree the comments are very misleading and it is unfortunate that they have no been corrected or retracted.
I agree with you on this one. On the other hand most of the open source/commercial duo companies often offer their products including a standard support level equivalent to your Basic 1-year support which Isomorphic separately charges fortunes for. This is the trap I fell into when I bought the Pro license. I went with the assumption ( well, I shouldn’t have assumed but read the license text well) that Support is included and was later surprised to hear that there wasn’t. It’s a norm in the Software industry that Software licenses come automatic with standard support. You only pay extra when you need those Silver, Gold, etc levels of support.
One other thing about Isomorphic that baffles me is why they publish their product prices openly but hide their support prices and only offer them on request basis.
As mentioned earlier, many Software companies offer their products packaged with some form of basic support. I think Isomorphic has to seriously consider this model too to avoid the potential that people use the product wrongly and come up later to express their frustration openly in the form of blogs, like we have seen in the other user’s blog. You are lucky that guy was willing to edit his original message according to your suggestions but there are also many who wouldn’t. By then the damage may have already been done because you never know how many people read it before you and never came back to read the corrected/retracted text.
I must also admit, I sense sometimes some form of arrogance in the tone of the responses coming from Isomorphic, especially when it is related to some criticism of their product and licensing models.
It is true that I’m criticizing now, but it’s because I think SmartClient is a great product but the licensing model could be better. I also think, like the thread starter also mentioned, that SmartClient deserves more exposure to the community. The current licensing model wouldn’t bring it there.
Isomorphic may excise their arrogance again and ignore this post, like they often do. What I can assure is that I will one day also come up with my own experience using SmartClient. Those would be based on facts like I’ve seen them in the docs and applied as is to the best of my knowledge. I can already promise now that when that day comes, no amount of arrogance and threats from Isomorphic would force me to edit or retract my message.
Sorry you were confused about bundled support. We have, in the past, made various revisions to the website and docs to make it less likely that this confusion can occur.
It seems in this case you had a very strong expectation that support would be bundled, and that was most likely where the misunderstanding came from. However, we would disagree that bundled support is more or less common than separate support. It’s just a mix.
We must also point out that Isomorphic has never threatened anyone, nor have we ever even asked for a retraction of a subjective opinion (such as not liking our skins).
However when someone gets the facts wrong, we will very clearly explain that they have made a mistake. Perhaps this can come across as arrogant - no one likes to be corrected when they are wrong - but our motivation is just to get the facts explained in clear, unambiguous terms.
Finally, please do not take a lack of reply as arrogance. We cannot reasonably answer all questions. If you choose not to purchase support, use the information in the FAQ to have the best chance of getting some free help, and if that fails, please realize it is because we are busily improving the product rather than arrogantly snickering at your questions
I would like to share my experience with Smartclient. I am a paying-for-support user, I have used Smartclient to generate the user interface (400+ tables/forms/grids) of an ERP system using a user interface definition created by user/consultants.
I use Smartclient javascript and have written/done the server side code myself (implementing a generic json web-service layer).
Some experiences (positive and also some things which I would do differently):
the feature set is incredibly rich and much richer than provided by competitors
the library is great, the api is incredibly extensive and if you occasionally can’t find an api method, often there is an undocumented method/property which can be set/extended/overwritten to get the expected behavior.
for me the support pricing level is fine/good, and should work also for smaller consulting companies, also open source products need a commercial model behind it to ensure a sustainable future (which is very important imo).
I am very satisfied with the features set supported by Smartclient and also by the development of new features in new releases.
for me the documentation is fine/extensive, the code has good comments inline, the source code of Isomorphic itself is sometimes complex, but it also shows the many use cases covered by Isomorphic, the source code shows that Smartclient is a mature product with a fair history, however it also feels that certain things are a bit different/less-standard than with other frameworks (like polluting the global namespace with ID’s of components, smartclient javascript code structure itself), it would be very nice to have a html5-only version (without code to support ‘old’ browsers) of Smartclient to see how that would look like.
the original poster says that there is no source code, for the client side there is and it has been very easy for me to switch from the obfuscated to the non-obfuscated/documented code in development time.
the support on the forum has been good, the real bugs I found have all been acknowledged, yes often an example has to be provided, but I am a developer myself and the only real way to solve an issue is to reproduce it, so this is quite understandable
the bug solution speed is incredible/amazing, the fast majority of bugs have been solved in 1-2 days, the remaining issues within a week.
I also find the tone of the replies on the forum to other (probably non-paying) users sometimes too harsh, imv this hurts the great product delivered by Isomorphic, for me an always friendly approach would show an even more powerfull and even more professional image
For me personally, there have been two cases where Isomorphic could have been more flexible in making the framework more extendable. These are feature requests which would have taken Isomorphic less time to do then answer my forum posts. But for some reason unknown to me, Isomorphic did not want to take the effort. But to stress, Isomorphic is entitled to make this decision (although my approach is different for our users), these were feature requests and there are sometimes workarounds (not nice, copying a large method and changing one line…). http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=19082 http://forums.smartclient.com/showthread.php?t=15966
I think that Isomorphic can benefit greatly from a public issue system and public source code system where issues are linked to changes committed to cvs/svn/git. Overall the open-source image of Isomorphic can be improved in my opinion.
My 2 cents, ofcourse please reply if my comments are in some ways unreasonable or if someone is not in agreement with them.
