ZK Developer's Guide

Integration with
Other Frameworks
ZK's biggest strength is its productivity. But it does have other advantages:
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ZK decouples the rendering logic from the presentation logic. That means
with ZK, applications can be retargetted to devices other than the browser,
such as the desktop or Swing or even a mobile device.
Async update has always been an issue. With ZK the whole async update
business can be abstracted into a timer component and it is very easy to do.
However, you still have to pay attention to your server-side logic.
ZK's ZUML makes it easy to build complex UI component trees. It also
shortens the edit—compile—test cycle for developers.
ZK allows developers to keep their business logic on the server side.
ZK is a great framework but the focus is on the GUI so other frameworks may be
needed. This chapter discusses the integration of ZK with other frameworks so as to
overcome these weaknesses. One of the most important frameworks is Spring. This
is very often used together with Hibernate. As we will see, it is very easy to integrate
ZK with other frameworks. Once it was difficult to use captchas but in the latest ZK
versions, ZK supports captchas natively.
Integration with the Spring Framework
Spring is one of the most complete lightweight containers, which provides
centralized, automated configuration, and wiring of your application objects.
It improves your application's testability and scalability by allowing software
components to be first developed and tested in isolation, then scaled up for
deployment in any environment. This approach is called the POJO (Plain Old Java
Object) approach and is gaining popularity because of its flexibility.