Any real-world experience of the "ZK" Ajax framework?

Question

Does anyone have real-world experience of ZK that they can pass on? The marketing blurb on their web site makes it all sound too good to be true. Any issues with performance, browser compatibility, tooling, widget availability, etc?

Answer 1

My group built and deployed a really nice application using zk at my last company. We were pretty happy with what we were able to do with zk for the front-end and a pretty solid model with a heavy dose of aspectj.

Here's an example screencast of two browsers showing a few in-place editable objects processing and propagating changes throughout our application. I did a later screencast that was similar, but separated the edits from the persistence (just as an example).

Answer 2

The performance varies depending from the browser you use. In the Internet Explorer some components don't react as fast as in Firefox. Also there were some bugs (missing list-header in IE, not exactly positioned button of combo box in FF), but they are already fixed in the current release 3.5.2. ZK Studio is a really good tool for developing with ZK in Eclipse. The wide Widget-Palette depends on the edition, which can be very expensive (e.g. Enterprise Edition with Spring Support). Cause for the most web applications you have to use the commercial edition, otherwise the General Public License requires copy-left of the developed web application.

Answer 3

i found zk very fantastic, is not a lot of time that i worked on. First i tried to port DHTML Calendar (Week Planner) to ZK framework. Yes you need to try your application on different browser, but if you pay attention all work fine. now i try to make a web site for i customer in italy http://www.blu-blu.info , on IE if i embed some windows inside a div with overflow:auto i found some proble in tab "noleggio".

Answer 4

Currently there are two problems that I think ZK can do better :

1. Session & Desktop Memory Consumption management
2. Look & Feel customization

First problem is a main issue in every AJAX framework who want to leverage "how easy to do a Stateful-conversation" and "minimize memory consumption", I think ZK got a good grade comparing to others(Especially those based on JSF) but still not good enough to me(I hope it's desktop aging could be rated by developer and an auto cache for huge static content would be a plus).
Second problem is about documentation and tools, I don't think UI Designer would have patient to learn how to polish there web site in ZUL file, they want CSS and HTML. I think a WYSIWYG Designer is want user want especially about styling.