AJAX Magazine: ZK is Simple and Rich AJAX and XUL Web framework : Mobile Edition

Published on 2005-12-26 21:37:44

The live demo of ZK features show a very rich framework with tons of great features such Simple Elements Inputs, Radio buttons, checkboxes ..., Modal dialogs, Layout elements, Toolbar and menus, Listboxes, Trees and much more. ZK is written in JAVA and released under GPL license.

ZK project looks very well organized and documented specially, you can find Quick Start Guide [PDF], and a detailed User Guide [PDF], in addition to essays. The available essay written by Henri Chen, show porting of google.xul to the ZK Framework. Henry explained that he had the porting done in less than an hour, I give it a try as you can see in the screenshot below taken from the live demo page.

ZK includes an AJAX-based mechanism to automate interactivity, a rich set of XUL-based components to enrich usability, and a markup language to simplify development. The AJAX-based mechanism consists of three parts as depicted below: ZK loader, ZK AU Engine and ZK Client Engine.

http://ajax.phpmagazine.net/upload/2005/12/zk-framework-thumb.png

Very interesting project for the JAVA developers, that could be very helpful to develop advanced AJAX applications, and the use of XUL make it much more powerful in my opinion. To get started Download ZK Framework and follow instructions in the Quick Start Guide.

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