ZK - Open Source Ajax Java Framework

Both, jQtouch as well as jQuery mobile are awesome UI frameworks for mobile development.

Has anyone ever tried to combine them with ZK to create mobile versions of their web applications?

I mean, if ZK supports jQuery, wouldn't there be a way to implement jQuery Mobile support?

A few weeks ago we deployed a corporate application for the new iPads we have purchased. At first our intension was to build the application using ZK. Unfortunately we had many problems (grid scrolling, paging etc) and i had posted some issues in this forum until we realized that the problem had nothing to do with ZK. It is safari's problem running on iPhone/iPad which cannot parse ajax requests correctly. To ensure that it was not ZK's problem we have made some additional tests with other Ajax frameworks having the same results. Finally, the only option was to use native jsp pages with jqTouch.

Notice that we have not tested ZK against other smartphones or tablets. Just iPhone/iPad. I don't know if the same problems exist with android.

Are you serious? Safari mobile cannot handle Ajax requests? O.o

I didn't say it does not handle ajax requests at all. I said that it does not handle correctly all ajax requests which is something that unfortunately you realize after having built the first "simple" pages and go deeper in more complex things.

hope that helps

Hm, that sounds very weird :-)
What do you mean by "not all ajax requests"?
What kind of requests does Safari not process?

I would suggest you to try to run the ZK demo using an ipad. You should see some "strange" behavior in various controls.

Hi cyiannoulis,

We have tested with zk demo on ipad,
did you see any demo that cannot work on ipad?

Hi jimmy. For example Grid -> Load On Demand :: Scroll bars are not displayed at all.

>> For example Grid -> Load On Demand :: Scroll bars are not displayed at all.
Same problem on android (2.3.3).

Hm, that's very interesting.
I can confirm that there are no scrollbars on Android 2.2.

However, I personally wouldn't use the standard ZK components for touch-based user interfaces since they don't seem to be optimized for that from a usability point of view.
Instead, I'd recommend creating a dedicated UI with jQtouch or jQuery mobile which gives the whole thing a much more usable and native look and feel. That also was the reason for my initial question.

I saw something in a blog somewhere (sorry can't find it again now) about JQuery mobile support in ZK6. I'd be super-interested to learn any more about the potential for using ZK to make applications compatible with major mobile platforms. Any news from the team on that?

I had a skype call yesterday with some of the ZK team and they said that it would be technically possible to integrate jQuery mobile into ZK but they don't seem to really have plans for that yet.
They also asked me if I'd prefer a separate set of mobile components or additional mobile-compatible versions of the current ZK components.
Besides that they suggested to simply use the standard ZK desktop components for mobile since they'd work pretty well on smartphones and tables.
However, I personally would love jQuery mobile integration in ZK so my users get a more "native app" feeling from the UI.

If there's any ideas for the tough component would like or what they should do,
posting a feature request and it would be great .

http://tracker.zkoss.org

I love to write components , but the major issue for writing the tough device component for me,
is that I didn't aware of what user expect a tough component should be .

For my personal opinion , I don't think it's a good ideas to have a all-in-one component that could support both Desktop and mobile ,
it could be compatible in the basic manner , but I would not do that if I am really developing a webapp.

So I would prefer to have a additional component set that user to develop the pages for mobile only.

Have to highlight this , that's all my personal opinion. :)

I would love to see a navigation component which lets the user navigate between multiple pages with a nice sliding transition like: http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0b2/docs/pages/multipage-template.html
Basically I think that this concept is very similar to ZK's tabbox/tabpanel but it looks nicer, has this cool animation and a more "native mobile" look.

Good example Valmar. In fact if you browse the jquery mobile demos on a phone, you can see just how much better the experience is than trying to do the same with the ZK demos on a phone. With the growth rate of mobile web, not having a convincing story for mobile could be a reason to pass over ZK as a framework. That would be a shame, as its the best AJAX framework I've come across - on the desktop at least.

I couldn't find the original Blog entry mentioning JQuery Mobile, but I did see mention of "ZK Reach" and "ZK Touch". I wonder what these are / were?

I am working on a similar technology, called MZul, which is based on jQueryMobile. It's an MVC framework that runs on client-side only at the moment.
Here's a POC that I mimic ZK tags to render a mobile page. I am sure you can understand what this will look like :)

<?title "MZul"?>

<zk>
  <page id="p1" apply="FirstController">
    <header caption="Test">
      <button icon="home"/>
    </header>
    <content>
      <listview>
        <list-divider>Component</list-divider>
        <listitem href="#p2">Test</listitem>
      </listview>
      <dialog href="first.html">First Dialog</dialog>
    </content>
    <footer>OK</footer>
  </page>
  <page id="p2" apply="SecondController">
    <content>
      <listview>
        <list-divider>Page 2</list-divider>
        <listitem href="#p1">Test</listitem>
      </listview>
    </content>
  </page>
</zk>

Looks nice.
Any plans for "real" ZK integration and server-side logic?

valmar,

It's based on jQueryMobile, which is different from the current jQuery stack used by ZK at the moment (at least the programming model behind).

The plans are two approaches, actually.
Firstly, a client-side only to generate Android or iOS applications. This approach is solely for making an offline app.
Secondly, a client/server approach, similar to the standard ZK at some level.
However, the programming model I am looking at now is from client -> server, rather than the server generating client codes.

That's a good idea since mobile applications often need to work offline without an internet connection.

From the server-side programming perspective, I got a demo running:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/381580/zkgrails/Zendo%20Mobile%2001.mp4

It's been integrating as ZK components atop ZK6.