[GO-ESSP] Any experience with ZK rich internet framework?

[Rocky Dunlap]

Hi Jon,

I have some experience with ZK, although it has been at least a year since I
have used it.
I'll briefly give some pros and cons based on my experience:

Pros
--The XML markup they use for building the GUIs is great for rapid
prototyping
--The toolkit of widgets is rich and continues to grow
--Much of the behind the scenes wiring is done for you
--The end product looks great

But...
--The framework is not designed to work with existing web applications.  In
other words, you have to commit to the whole thing or nothing.
 Additionally, it would be hard to plug in only a piece of ZK into an
existing application.
--Because so many details are abstracted, it can be hard to know what's
going on behind the scenes, and therefore hard to do any custom
functionality.


For these reason, Curator decided to go with YUI from Yahoo.  Working with
YUI does take a bit more time, but in my opinion it gives more complete
control over the behavior of the widgets and the AJAX requests, etc.  Also,
you can take only a single YUI component and add it to an existing
application.

So if your needs are to build a quick web app from scratch, then ZK could
very well be the right way to go.  However, if you need fine-grained control
of widgets or need to slowly evolve an existing app, I would check out YUI.
 Also, unless you are web UI expert, the ZK app will likely look more
polished than an app built with YUI.  If you really need to impress someone
with a sexy UI, then ZK should be among your top choices...

Julien Chastang is very familiar with YUI and similar toolkits, so he might
have additional comments...

Rocky


On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Jon Blower <jdb at mail.nerc-essc.ac.uk>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Following some very interesting discussions in Seattle, I came across
> the Zk framework for developing rich internet apps.  Does anyone have
> any experience with this?  It seems roughly similar to Google Web
> Toolkit except that you don't have to code any of the communications
> between server and client - Zk sorts this all out for you.
>
> Cheers, Jon
>
> --
> Dr Jon Blower
> Technical Director, Reading e-Science Centre
> Environmental Systems Science Centre
> University of Reading
> Harry Pitt Building, 3 Earley Gate
> Reading RG6 6AL. UK
> Tel: +44 (0)118 378 5213
> Fax: +44 (0)118 378 6413
> j.d.blower at reading.ac.uk
> http://www.nerc-essc.ac.uk/People/Staff/Blower_J.htm
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