A big thank you to one of our German contributors named Stephan (terrytornado) as he located a thesis by Sönke THIESEN from the University of Hamburg in Germany regarding a port of CommSy, a webbased community system to support learning and working communities, into Java.

ZK, GWT, Wicket and more..

The port considered 57 frameworks including ourselves, GWT, Wicket and Tapestry. Eight frameworks were chosen to move to the prototyping phase where each framework was used to produce a system prototype for evaluation. The criteria were split up into categories hard and soft, here is how ZK measured up against their criteria:

Hard Criteria

• Liveliness
  • There is both an active developer and user community
  • New versions are released every month
  • Old version branches will continue to be maintained
• Pure Java
  • One of the alternatives within the framework is to describe the user interface in pure Java
  • Most of the documentation is related to using ZUML to describe the interface
  • Using Java code to describe the interface is similar to Swing or SWT
• Compatibility
  • Working with Spring and other frameworks is possible and well documented
  • Hibernate works smoothly with ZK
  • There were no problems and incompatibility when constructing the prototype

So having met all the hard criteria the report moves onto the soft criteria!

Soft Criteria

• Simple configuration
  • ZK has certain framework specific settings
• Component diversity
  • Components are available to cover all sections of the system
  • The appearance and behaviour of the application is appealing to the user
• Customizable styles
  • The appearence and style of the components can be altered
• Licensing
  • ZK provides open source licensing

And the winner is….ZK

The most important aspects of a framework to the author was which was more efficient and effective at producing the best possible end result. The author decided that ZK won out and therefore ZK was chosen for the project! Naturally we are please with the result and are extremely pleased that ZK is not only recognized in industry but also in academic circles.