Equivalent to webcontrols in other frameworks?

Question

What is the equivalent to web controls in frameworks other than ASP.Net?

Specifically I'd like to know about Java, PHP and Ruby on Rails.

What are the relative merits/faults of each of these frameworks for web development?

I've had some exposure to ASP.Net and have been asked to look into developing an app that will have configurable controls on it. I know how I'd do this in ASP.Net, but it's to run on a linux box and in my experience Mono is not mature/stable when running ASP.Net.

Clarification

Basicly what I mean by webcontrols is a set of reusable componenet that I can initialize with various values.

So if for example I want to have a reusable component which draws a graph of some kind on the page. and i want to lay out several of these to graph different things.

Answer 1

I believe there aren't.

ASP.NET Web controls are a hodgepodge of <input> and <submit> HTML elements put together to make use of the ASP.NET Web Forms Page Lifecycle. This in turn to facilitate windows-forms like behavior in a web application.

AFAIK in other frameworks they still make use of the plain HTML control elements coupled with Javascript to modify behavior.

Answer 2

In java world, 'Apache Wicket' provides one way of achieving this. The UI is built around the concept of components. Every Web page is composed of components.

It is different from traditional JSP programming and parallels with GUI widget development. Traditional jsp custom tags also act as components but composing a custom tag out of other custom tags is not supported.

Answer 3

There aren't any. But many high level frameworks define their type of web ui widgets.