News

jQuery-Style Selectors for Server-Side Java

• By John K. Waters
• February 23, 2011

Potix Corporation, the provider of Java Web development solutions based on the open source ZK Web framework, has just released a set of jQuery-style selectors within ZK designed to give developers an easy method of selecting and accessing server-side components.

ZK is an open source Ajax framework written in Java. The company calls it an "Ajax-plus-mobile framework" because of its support for Java Mobile, Android and various mobile browsers. The core of the framework is an Ajax-based event-driven mechanism, XUL and XHTML-based components, and a markup language for designing UIs. The framework complies with JSP, JSF, Portlet and Java EE technologies, and it can be integrated with existing enterprise environments and Java IDEs.

ZK apps can be built using pure Java, markup languages and/or scripting languages. The company says it provides developers with "a true event-driven model facilitating simple and transparent development of rich internet applications using pure Java."

Potix is best known for its Direct RIA architecture, a pure Java application engine designed to provide developers with direct access to user interface, databases and Web services. Based on ZK, Direct RIA and aims to simply and speed up the creation, deployment, and maintenance of rich Internet apps. Direct By programming user interfaces directly, the company says, web app development becomes "as intuitive as programming desktop applications." Programming database and enterprise resources directly frees developers from worrying about exposure of business logic to the client and exposure of business data over the Internet.

The new ZK aelectors are designed to make the implementation of such architectural patterns as Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) a straightforward process, the company said. The technology uses pure Java, and among its core capabilities is the ability to use Java annotations to automatically bind components to properties. The selectors also apply jQuery & CSS 3 style (Potix is known as a provider of server-side jQuery and CSS 3 style selectors using Java annotations). 

The company also markets a visual IDE called ZK Studio, which comes with tools for UI design, prototyping, development and deployment when implementing ZK applications. The IDE provides content assistance, variable highlighting and syntax coloring, among other features.

ZK itself is maintained by an active developer community. The community has produced more than 20 translations, 100 articles/blogs, 100,000 lines of codes and 1,500,000 downloads from more than 190 countries. It supports a number of third-party widgets, including JFreeChart, JasperReports, Google Maps, FCKeditor, Timeline, Timeplot, ExtJS and Dojo.

On February 1, the latest version of the framework (v 5.0.6) was released for testing. ZK downloads are available here.