Open source for J2EE presentation framework

Question

Hello Experts,

I am going to create J2ee based project, in which lots of GUI work is involved, like creating tree and drag and drop of objects (like routers and switch) kind of thinks.

I would like to know is there any open source is available, with whom i can do rapid j2ee GUI development.

Thanks in advance.

Regards, Aj

Answer 1

JEE itself doesn't really address this kind of UI activity. If you're thinking about drawing a network diagram and dragging and dropping items on a canvas then that's happening in the client, perhaps a browser. JEE is pretty much a server-side framework, great for dealing with databases, queues and other enterprise connectivity, munging data and rendering HTML.

For traditional form-based UIs extension such as JSF give you lots of nice widgets for trees and other such UI structures but doesn't attack a "drawing" application.

A few years back when worked on an application of the kind I'm guessing you're thinking about, we used JavaScript/Dojo in the Browser to render the UI and JEE on the server, but we did a lot of manual coding - I don't know whether these days there are better frameworks. I'd recommend exploring client-side UI technologies to use in conjun ction with your JEE server-side stuff.

Answer 2

The JBoss Seam framework allows you to generate a whole application.

With JPA,EJB and JSF for presentation layer, You can choose between Icefaces and Richfaces as JSF component library, both support trees as well as drag and drop.

Answer 3

Checkout Grails, which brings the speed of development known from Ruby on Rails to the JVM.

For trees, drag and drop etc, I would use one of the many JavaScript frameworks, like Dojo, Prototype+Scriptaculous, jQuery+jQueryUI+plugins, YUI3 etc.

Answer 4

I would suggest ICEfaces which is an implementation of JSF but process all requests via AJAX. It also support drag and drop feature and other components just like desktop gui such as treeview, datagrid, radio buttons, combobox, menu, richtext box, process bar..., check out its components here: http://component-showcase.icefaces.org/component-showcase/showcase.iface