When comparing SmartClient vs Dojo Toolkit, the Slant community recommends Dojo Toolkit for most people. In the question“What are the best Javascript UI Widget Toolkits?” Dojo Toolkit is ranked 3rd while SmartClient is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Dojo Toolkit is:
Dojo Toolkit is a highly modular framework. It uses AMD modules and the module system is extremely powerful and easy to learn.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Good documentation
There is an online showcase and a 100+ Getting Started guide
Pro Advanced UI widgets
Layouts, grids, forms with a lot of builtin functionality.
Pro Highly modular
Dojo Toolkit is a highly modular framework. It uses AMD modules and the module system is extremely powerful and easy to learn.
Pro Consistent and complete
Pro Not only web apps
Dojo is not used only for web development. The widgets featured in Dojo can also be used to create mobile user interfaces.
Cons
Con Expense: Free LGPL version but expensive to leverage the real power of the framework
The Developer version starts at $745 / Developer
Con Difficult to integrate with other frameworks like React, Vue, Angular...
SmartClient has it's own layout mechanism and doesn't have anything like Kendo UI's framework support for Angular, React, Vue, ..
Con Not able to keep up with the future of the web
The web is moving towards web components, something that Dojo does not implement. In its current state Dojo badly needs more abstraction and it also needs to provide some form of modern application architecture.
Con Integrated first-party loader makes interoperability extremely difficult
Con No startup-function
When the dojo-javascript is loaded, it will directly run the application. No chance to intercept with the options
