ZK - Simply Ajax and Mobile

Your demo looks very impressive. At the moment several frameworks like yours are growing. What are the differences between ZK and Echo or Casabac?

Echo2 is an interesting product. It did a good job for Swing programmers to migrate from desktop to Web applications. However, we don’t think it is enough.

Why PHP and Ruby are getting popular these days? Java is a better language than them (and easy to learn except OO is hard for some people), but its framework is too sophisticated. Remember how many documents to read before we could write the first application? Thus,

* We preferred a markup language, like HTML, XUL and XAML. Programming manually is an optional, like not all of team members are programmers.

* Web applications are more dynamic than desktop apps. We then developed some technologies, e.g., DSP (a dynamic JSP), and utilized BeanShell to enable you to dynamically change your Web contents and codes.

* Different people might have different preferences of components. Some like HTML, the others like XUL or XAML. The architecture shall allow you to choose.

* Components are never enough. How easy to develop is important.

I am not familiar with Casabac, so I may not be the person to answer the question. However, you might want to check the following items.

* What components do they provide? Are they proprietary? Is it easy to develop your own components, even a new set of components, say XAML?

* Do they support simple-yet-flexible threading model, such as modal dialogs, suspend and resume?

* Do they allow you to embed Java codes directly into pages for fast prototyping and customization?

* Can you reuse the existent HTML/JSP pages but adding Java codes to manipulate them dynamically? Do you need to rewrite them? Do they work under Portal?

Having used echo framework for a few years, I see that the problem with Echo is that it was developed in an era before AJAX and the introduction of AJAX was an afterthought. ZK is similar to Echo but is easier to develop with. ZK should pose a strong competition to the likes of JSF and Tapestry. None of the other web frameworks offer the simplicity that ZK offers. The only thing missing now is a good eclipse plugin:)

Thanks.

Agree that it is important to have a good eclipse plugin for designing UI visually.

However, we currently focus on supporting HTML directly. It makes it possible to use Dreamweaver and other authoring tools.