ZK Developer's Guide

Preface
ZK is an open-source web development framework that enables web applications
to have the rich user experiences and low development costs that desktop
applications have had for years. ZK includes an AJAX-based event-driven engine,
rich sets of XML User Interface Language (XUL), and XHTML components, and
a markup language (ZUML).The ZK rich client framework takes the so-called
server-centric approach: the content synchronization of components and the event
pipelining between clients and servers are automatically done by the engine and
AJAX plumbing codes are completely transparent to web application developers.
Therefore, the end users get rich user interfaces with similar engaged interactivity
and responsiveness to that of desktop applications, while for programmers,
development remains similar in simplicity to that of desktop applications
What This Book Covers
In Chapter 1 we give an introduction to, and take a look behind the ZK framework.
In the last section of this chapter, we show some important issues from the ZK User
Interface Language (ZUML).
In Chapter 2 we will implement a CRUD (Create—Read—Update—Delete)
application. We will also design and implement the pages with the ZK framework.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, we start with a simple CRUD application. The first
thing we do here is to add some AJAX features to the application (live data). Here,
we will learn many cornerstones provided by the ZK framework, and that we
only have to implement some interfaces to use these features. We will move the
application from a mixed code approach to a Model-View-Controller Architecture.
Chapter 4 deals with the end of the third phase in the development of a CRUD
application with the AJAX ZK framework. We start with a simple application, and
extend it step by step. The application now has many features that you will need in
other applications as well.