ZK™ Simply Rich
First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for your continuous enthusiasm about ZK. Without your support, ZK won't be able to accomplish the wonderful achievements ever. Only within two years, ZK has accumulated over half a million downloads. The list of customers, ranging from small to Fortune 500 companies, is growing fast. The deployment of ZK is moving from pioneer projects to the de facto standard for rich Internet applications in many companies.
The most important of all is that tens of thousands developers are enjoying the power of "Simply Rich." Developing a rich Internet application can be and shall be easier than developing a desktop application. ZK is not yet another Ajax framework. Rather, a new generation of Web application development.
It is our driving force to carry ZK to a higher level. Here I'd like to share the new development of ZK in 2008 with you. Your feedback is highly appreciated.
Year 2007 was a busy year for us to deliver new concepts to simplify the Ajax application development, such as fulfill on demand, event forwarding and MVC by composer. In 2008, we will emphasize more on providing more documents and better integration with the development tools.
Documentation
The long-awaiting Style Reference Guide and Component Development Guide will be published in 2008. Style Reference Guide will demostrate how to customize the look and feel for each component with pure CSS. Component Development Guide will describe how to implement a component either from scratch or by wrapping a third-party widget.
In addition, we will keep exploring new concepts and new ways to apply features through small talks. For example, many of application-specific features can be done by use of annotations, such as multilingual and Web service integration.
Development Tools
Cooperating with the third parties is still our main approach to provide the better integration with the development tools. For example, REM for NetBeans, and Zero Kode, zk-bench, and eZing Builder for Eclipse.
In 2008, we are going to take a step further. First, we will provide an Eclipse plugin to simplify the creation of ZK applications and ZUML files, and to provide better integration with Zero Kode. Many of them shall be done with no more than a few mouse clicks.
Second, we will explore the possibility of translating UML into ZUML automatically by providing a plugin for, say, Umbrello UML Modeller and/or Rational Rose.
ZK is one of the most complete frameworks delivering versatile rich user experiences. But, we don't stop, and instead, we will keep providing more components and more richness, The most notables are ZK Spreadsheet, more third-party components, and 508 compliance.
ZK Spreadsheet
ZK Spreadsheet is one of the most important development in 2008. Unlike Microsoft Excel, it is Web-based. Unlike Google Spreadsheets, it has a neat and powerful Java API that is 100% controllable and customizable. You can embed any number of ZK spreadsheets into your Web page(s). Best of all, it is open source.
Third-party Components
In 2008, we will keep cooperating with contributors to integrate more components from third parties, such as Ext-JS, Codepress, and SMILE.
508 Compliance
We had some progress in 508 compliance in 2007. However, it's still a long way to go. We will keep improving the accessibility of ZK in 2008.
To work better with existent applications, to integrate seamlessly with other frameworks and to reach more devices, we introduced ZK JSP Tags, ZK JSF Components, ZK Seam, ZK Seasar, native namespaces, XML output, pluggable script interpreters, pluggable expression evaluators, and ZK Mobile in 2007.
In 2008, we will keep delivering updates to these extensions, and explore the best practice to work with them. In addition, we will keep on enabling your ZK applications to reach as many and various clients as possible.
Flash, AIR and Android
Like ZK Mobile, we will keep pushing your ZK applications to reach as many and versatile clients as possible, such as Flash player, AIR and Android. In addition, we'd like to explore the possibility of using, say, Flash CS3 to design a ZK page. It is interesting to see the chemistry that can be achieved by combining the simplicity of ZK's server-centric architecture with the versatile functionality of rich clients.
Integration with Other Frameworks
We will upgrade the support of JSF from 1.1 to 1.2, and Seam from 1.2 to 2.0. We will also provide more utilities for variant frameworks, such as JPA, BMP, and Web services.
Scripting Languages
With the help of contributors, ZK has supported the most mainstream scripting language: Java (BeanShell), JavaScript (Rhino), Ruby (JRuby), Groovy (and Grails), and Python (Jython) in 2007.
In 2008, we'd like to explore the best practice to use ZK with the scripting languages -- particularly, how to boost the productivity of developing a rich Internet application with a dynamic programming language.
An open-source community is all about collaboration. ZK started with a superior architecture that is easy to extend, and with a friendly community who loves to share. We saw a lot of collaboration among the ZK community, such as contributing codes, translating messages, submitting articles, suggesting features, reporting bugs, and answering questions in 2007. In 2008, we will enhance the website to encourage collaboration further. For example, the forum will be renewed with ZK Forum.
Disclaimer: This roadmap is for information only and represents current view of ZK product direction. None of the information should be interpreted as a commitment on the part of Potix Corporation. POTIX MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
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The Simplest Way to Make Web
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