Web Application Framework - HTML5 with mobile devices JavaScript support

Question

Hello all!

I searched for Java based web application frameworks the last few days. I have to build a Java EE backend and a HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript frontend which can be accessed with multi-touch capable devices. So I will need modern JavaScript frameworks like Sencha Touch.

My backend should be built upon with Java EE, Hibernate and MySQL. I have two kinds of data transfer: AJAX / JSON so the page does not need to be reloaded and pages and normal pages which reload the page by sending a form with POST (or do you think to have more the feeling as a application I should do all stuff with AJAX/JSON?).

I found several web application frameworks:

• JavaSever Faces
• Apache Wicket
• Spring MVC
• handle it only with jar files for JSON (and REST)
• Google Web Toolkit

What do you think will fit best? Perhaps you can exclude one of them, that would also be great, so I can take a closer look at the remaining technologies.

Best Regards, Tim.

Answer 1

Interesting question.

Concerning exclusion: If you use a JS framework like Sencha Touch in the frontend I don't see the sense in using something like GWT which is for frontend-code generation.

I would probably stick with a more lightweight framework like http://www.playframework.org/.

You get your data from the backend and then hand it via JSON over to your frontend code i.e. sencha, sproutcore, cappuccino, gwt or what you choose to use.

Let me know what you choose :-)