ZK as GUI for a stand-alone application

asked 2006-10-08 14:04:15 +0800

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Orignial message at:
https://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3952410

By: mabap

Since the GUI components provided ZK seem to be quite complete I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to build the GUI of a stand-alone application with ZK. I was thinking about it, because it would be
a) cool ;-)
b) a way to rapid-prototype the GUI
c) nearly automatically make the application code migrateable to a different computer while running.

Such an application would contain its code, an embedded webserver, the ZK libraries and its ZUL files, _all in one jar_. The user executes the jar, which starts the app including the webserver as well as webbrowser automatically provisioned with the URL of the webserver. The user then sees the browser as the GUI of the app.

The main point here is _one jar_ as you don't want the user having to install and configure a webserver and then install ZK and the application into the (hopefully correctly configured) directory. From playing around a bit with jetty and ZK it is at least not obvious if such a thing is possible.

The other important property is of course reaction speed of the GUI. When accessing the local ZK demo (running on local jetty) I had some rather long (>2 sec.) pauses when loading frames, e.g. the "more tabboxes" one, with a clearly visible "Processing" shown in the corner. Later this was gone, probably some code needed to be loaded either into jetty or from jetty to firefox. Is it somehow possible to preload this code since application startup time is less critical than reaction time once it is started up.


So just to repeat my question from the beginning: Anyone who has done this?
Any pointers to experience reports on the web? At least this comment
(http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=3741579) from one of the developers doesn't sound to promising.

(And please, no discussions a la "Normal apps are dead anyway, just make a webapp out of it".)