| In 1994, I developed an infrastructure, inspired by zApp and the Object Window Library (OWL), for developing an accounting system for Windows. In 2000, I developed another infrastructure, inspired by Struts and WebWorks, for developing another accounting system for the J2EE platform. After coaching and watching the development of both systems, I found that not only did the web edition require more advanced programming skills and prerequisites but its total cost was four times more than the client/server’s. Worst of all, the user experience harkened back to the age of green terminals, though the look, after decorating with proper images and cascading style sheets, was modern and fresh.
I started wondering whether these problems were intrinsic to the web or if the programming model was simply inadequate. Looking back at the success of desktop applications in the 1990s, the event-driven, component-based programming model played a big role. Blessed by being easy to learn and develop, this model is the standard and best way to handle interactive and responsive user interfaces. Could this model be applied to web applications? After using ZK to develop several commercial projects, I believe I’ve got the answer––yes!
The reasoning behind that answer is what I want to share with you in this book. How can the ZK Framework make your life easy and your customers happy at the same time? How does ZK help you painlessly write a rich web application? How can you write a rich Ajax web application without learning JavaScript? How you can concentrate on improving your application itself rather than focusing on the plumbing required ensure browser compatibility? You will find your answers in this book.
This book is about how to make Ajax programming simple and easy––the core values of the ZK Framework––as simple as programming desktop applications and as easy as authoring HTML pages. Writing rich Ajax web applications can be very elaborate. On the browser side, you can program user interfaces with HTML, DOM, CSS, and JavaScript. On the server side, you can write business logic and data-access code with another language, such as Java. Then, you have to handle the browser-to-server messages with asynchronous HTTP. Finally, you still have to fight the incompatibility issues and JavaScript bugs across browsers.
This book will introduce you to painlessly programming Ajax applications with the ZK Framework. You are not required to write user interfaces on the browser side. Rather, you construct your applications on the server side with ZK’s more than 160 Java components. The complex heterogeneous technologies involved in Ajax programming are automatically handled by ZK behind the scenes.
In this book, I tell you how to install and run ZK programs and how ZK completes its behind-thescenes jobs, as well as explaining the important ZK components. I then walk you through creating a real web application, where you learn how to design the application screens, access the database, and write control code to coordinate the ZK presentation layer and the data accessing layer.
I sincerely hope this book helps you out of the old, painstaking, and time-consuming way of developing Ajax web applications. So read on to see how ZK makes your life easy and your customers happy at the same time. Enjoy your Ajax web programming experience. |
