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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: Nitobi Complete UI - new way of doing Web UI in java?
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I am constantly re-evaluating my current Struts1/Common Controls combination for doing web UI within our logistics project. I was recently pointed to nitobi Complete UI which is another Ajax driven component library.
After visiting their impressive demo section where they showed complex components like trees and grids, i was excited to see the technical details. Since i saw some knowledge base articles about Struts1/Struts2 on their site, i hoped for some taglibrary doing all the component stuff. Unfortunately its not like that. They implemented the components completely in Javascript.�� Furthermore, all events that can be fired are also of course javascript events which basically map to js functions. This leads to complete java independent event handlers. I am sure you can propagate these events to java classes somehow (at least via Servlet/Action/JSP calls in the JS function) but at the end you will most likely be in a maintenance nightmare.
I was skeptic when i saw that they support a broad range of programming envrionments like ASP.net, PHP, Java and even Coldfusion. This of course means that their product is mainly a javascript framework with some helper classes in each of those programming languages they support, for creating a table model for example. Its not like Struts or JSF where you are completely in the world of java.
Featurewise their components are nevertheless impressive. The grid has excellent java support and their paging and lazy loading seems to work quite well.�� The docs are not there yet, but they have good cheat sheets for each component. But at the end i am sure that the maintenance costs are definitely too high compared to a pure JSF or Tapestry or whatever java based framework approach with components in mind. I dont want to fiddle around with javascript event handlers and i am quite sure that their approach has more browser compatibility problems in the long run.
With more and more javscript component frameworks emerging, it will be interessting to see how they do in the market space. The main problem is and will be the loose coupling to the real MVC framework behind.�� No matter if you use Spring MVC, Struts1, Struts2 or whatever, you are totally on your own how to connect the Javascript world with your serverside events and actions. This gap you dont have when you use JSF or Tapestry components.
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