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Zk is very powerful solution in modern web development, but there are some bad aspects related not with technology,
not with the people but about the energy and business model adopted by Zk ecosystem.
I want to use Rails mainly and (Flex a little) technology community to make my explanation and expose my opinion about a wrong ways of Zk approach. I promise my post isn't be so big or non sense...but I want tho show the serious problems and lack of ZK community and business model
Innovation!
In rails ecosystem, every day new blogs are being created also new screen cast and podcast and are launched in both free or commercial
way (peepcode, railscast, rails for zombie, learning rails 3,). People in this ecosystem are creative to make money exploring new way to expose rails for the world and community.
Is very rare to see this happening with ZK technology. The materials about screen casts and also blog that cover this technology are outdated in most of cases (see Zk Forge for see this, for example a huge of legacy code that doesn't work in most cases).
Documentation!
The official ZK documentation like Developers Guide and Style Guide follow the changes of new releases of this framework, but there are very few people posting new good material about ZK in the main web site and in bloggers outside too. It's common to see many outdated links in ZK website, some broke
links for lost documentation, many version of the same subject like mvc approach and very confusing and old small talks that aren't useful for the 5.x version of ZK right now.
Complete tutorials, step by step guidelines and build real application by scratch are missing for people like me are beginning with ZK framework. Poor new material and synergy here.
About books is very problematic aspect to consider too for people that are choosing ZK for web development.
In the opposite way of Flex and Rails, with this technology is easier than zk for find good books that cover the recent versions
of these technologies, for Rails 3 or Flex 4 there are several new books (free books too) . Four or three books aren't enough in for years.
Real Open Source Success!
Rails technology make possible to bring to community many good applications and tools like github, scribd, slideshare, twitter and very useful open source applications like redmine, lovebyless, spree web commerce (See More in open source rails to more) . With Flex it's the same....the number of good applications in google code, github and sourceforge are grow up day by day.
People behind off Zk framework should to help this great framework to grow and turn this easy too new people too believe that this worthwhile. Using money to pay more people to work with ZK, more books, more tutorials, more resources, more good open source initiatives, more media, more screen-casts more services
and ...
less mess, less legacy code, less fragmentation, less poor small talks, less poor documentation
Zk has a great idea, architecture and philosophy but some good new realizations and decisions should be take for
rescue ZK from the limbo.....like open laslo experience. It's time to win the battle!
HTML 5 is coming....
Hugs
Besides ZK licence model issue another problem with ZK is that this amazing framework didn't spread deservedly and according like *faces, flex and other technologies mentioned in the previous post. I feel that ZK forum is very responsible and agile for the users in feedback instead sjurisic opinion, the problem is a lack of new exciting tutorials, applications, events, new posts, screencasts and so on.
IMO, this framework is improving constantly but the "vibe" around ZK don't follow I guess this fantastic technology. I don't know if the cause is that ZK is a framework created outside USA or don't have business units in USA or Europe. The companies using ZK in commercial applications don't put enough emphasis on it I guess. So is difficult to find a reason....maybe people in this thread don't represent the most of ZK users that feel better with this technology, documentation, license model and all that for develop their apps with pleasure and productivity.
Best
Bera
Since no one mentions it, I have to comment that ZK has excellent commercial support. Their support responds to questions within 24 hours. They can make a patch release the next day for us to download. In case of difficult problems, their engineers use GotoMeeting online conference to go through our code to find the problem. The ZK people are courteous too. I am not aware of other open source projects have the same excellent support. To us, the commercial license is very valuable and critical to our product delivery.
@windeyu
:) Thanks, we'd like to make our both customer / community feel good.
recently, we're trying to find a better way to communicate with our user/devs, maybe social network ? any ideas ?
My 2c
I miss the "notify me on every new post" feature back on the source forge days.
The currently mail service is good for thoso who ask quenstions.
But for the others to reply, it's mandatory that you keep the forum site open, and always scanning the new posts.
Back on the SF days, I just scan my "zk" label at gmail, and based on the subject open the direct link and reply to it. Much easier then having to keep zk forum all the time...
@Bera: And about enterprise integration with spring..... When I tried to found some article or small talk too see different approaches...nope...fail.
E.g. see JBoss integration: http://docs.zkoss.org/wiki/Form_Based_Login_with_JAAS_on_JBoss_and_ZK
ZK 5 License:
IMHO it is a problem. E.g. If I want to use BugMS https://sourceforge.net/projects/bugms/ do I have to buy ZK EE? I think AGPL would be more appropriate here. But I think LGPL for every ZK package would definitely boost the community.
Cooperation: Reported bugs are fixed fast. The ZK team communicates on the forum. Great! However, I have tried to join the ZK Calendar project http://code.google.com/p/zkcalendar/ and except one or two fixes all my changes and improvements has not been accepted to the mainstream. (And I has no feedback why.) I think the reason was just a lack of time and manpower on ZK team, so I do not feel upset. But it is discouraging to propose any new changes.
3rd party addons page: I have also proposed some page for 3rd party addons, widgets, etc. It has not been realised yet. Something is at http://www.zkoss.org/demo/external.dsp but think this page would need to polish broken links and links to unrealized ZK projects and also clean separation between "open source" and just a "ZK success story showcase". One example: my friend Jiri Bubnik has just released http://code.google.com/p/zk-dl/ http://zk.datalite.cz/ And does not know any place where he can boast with this. ZK team has asked him to write a smalltalk, so until he find the time for this (and it may take very long) the community cannot know about his project.
I started playing around with ZK for a personal project around 1/2 year ago.
Before that, the only HTML/JS-based UI frameworks I knew were GWT and Wicket, so I bought books about them and tried to learn how to use GWT for my project.
A little later, I attended a pretty small RIA conference where one guy gave a quick introduction to ZK and I thought: "WOW, this is EXACTLY what I need".
After coming back home I started reading up on ZK and I knew that this was the technology I had to use.
Today, 1/2 year later I don't regret the choice of using ZK.
However, to get back to topic, before that conference I didn't read or hear anything about ZK in the media. All I read about were the "big ones" like GWT, Flex, Wicket and so on...
In my opinion, ZK's lack of presence in the media might be the problem, because if people don't know ZK at all, they can't see how good it is.
(Ever thought about paying some author to write the one or other article on one of the big it news portals like zdnet?)
Besides that, the documentation (PDF as well as the website) has some very very bad parts in english. I think that seriously needs a fix since it really didn't leave a good impression to me at the beginning.
What I really liked was the demo page where you could play around with the ZK components and see the source code.
Regarding licensing: Yes, I agree that the current model is to complicated... PE, PP, EE, CE... WHAT??
Regarding books: YES! Please, I want a ZK book. One of the first things I did when I started with ZK was checking Amazon for a book and I found... nothing useful.
Regarding screenshots: That's a MUST-have. When I started learning Adobe Flex, I learned at least 50% from screencasts because it's very comfortable and easy to learn.
So, when I started with ZK I was googling around for screencasts on ZK and found almost nothing. Now, that was frustrating.
But please, if you provide such screencasts, do it properly.
By "properly" I mean:
- High resolution (720p)
- Understandable english
- Good audio quality
- No own video player. Please use youtube or vimeo!! (May also drag users from there to here)
- See this blog http://www.gotoandlearn.com/ - He does very high quality screencasts.
A blog dedicated only for the purpose of posting screencasts would be great.
And as a last note: I don't think that having a thread like this on the forums leaves a good impression to potential new developers. Sentences like "technology X is dead!!" can spread very quickly on the web.
Hi Valmar
I agree totally with you. In whats help to increase ZK popularity when ZK team put all videos using jing player inside this site instead to put in sites like vimeo, youtube,
or others like teach me code, screencasts.org or similars?
For spread an technology in the media, a centralized model to put everything doesn't work.
Technologies like Rails, Google (GWT), JQuery, ExtJs and Flex, for example, have a very extensive documentation in their own sites but it´s possible to find new tutorials, screencasts and articles in everywhere outside the official websites.
The model for small talks simply sucks, now in zk web site is easier to find outdated material and material than great tutorial and examples. It's rare to see new blog entries in ZK blog sphere and it's very hard to see what people can doing with this framework, like xmedeko wrote in the previous post the exaple with ZK Lite.
And actually I'm using more the forum instead official documentation because references guides it's must have but aren't definitely cool and fun for learning an technology, but tutorials, blogs entries and screencasts are...
About the impression that this threat could be bring for the developers, I believe the intention is to get better and help to show whats can be wrong IMHO with ZK in some aspects. If I really like this RIA solution and I haven't just forgotten ZK and use another solution.
Please ZK team, pay attention in flex, gwt, Jquery, rails and vaadin communities and help to bring to ZK users the same or similar benefits that those frameworks given to their users
Hi Vilmar and Bera,
about screencasts: as a non-native English speaker, I prefer the written text.
about out of date small talks: I think the problem is that ZK is evolving very fast so the small talks get out of date very soon. I think it is better to take the smalltalks as a kind of "shared" blog and not as an official documentation. So it is simpler to take in that some smalltalks are outdated.
One tip: put a list of recent ZK tweets on your main web page zkoss.org. Something like http://www.zeroturnaround.com/ has on the bottom of the page. So the readers of zkoss.org main page see the community wibe and the twitters can get more feedback when they are twitting about zkoss. The only problem is how to search the twitter, you may try to join lists like:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=zkoss
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=zk+java
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=zk+ajax
@xmedeko Yeah, a Twitter stream on the website is absolutely state-of-the-art these days! 100% agree.
Besides that, @zkoss on Twitter is not active enough in my opinion.
The ZK team should place one dedicated Twitter guy in front of a computer who does nothing else but tweet with the community :-)
Asked: 2011-03-31 18:24:26 +0800
Seen: 3,400 times
Last updated: May 24 '17
