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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 The materials about screen casts and also blog that cover this technology are outdated in most of cases (see Zk Forge for see this, for example a huge of legacy code that doesn't work in most cases).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 It's common to see many outdated links in ZK website, some broke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
I think one of the problem is also, that you can't find easy any informations about "why should I use ZK and not 'xy'(like icefaces)?" .
At the moment i have the task, that I must evaluate different frameworks, but to find THE DIFFERENCE, it is very difficult....
I think Potix should animate different big publishing houses in various countrys (in Germany e.g. heise.de) to write more about ZK....
@fobi They'd have to write in german then for heise ;-)
I'd suggest going fo zdnet - That's more international.
Somehow I can't get rid of the feeling that there are a lot of germans around here :-)
I have used Zk Framework (especially ZK Spreadsheet) since September 2016. I agree this framework has poor documentation. I am Polish. If you want write here (forum), if you want add more keywords in post, add image - you must have karma points (what for?). I know also Vaadin. Better documentation, community, all is better. Owners of Vaadin talk with users on forum. What is interesting - good dicussion about zk framework in this thread was ended in May 2011. Six years ago... Zk never will be in the mainstream. It's right.
Hi vladcz
Let me show you a picture from the future... "Today Google announced that GWT is obsolete and development of future releases has stopped."
Good luck
The way ZK is developed, is not comparable with other open source projects. Just have a look at http://mavensync.zkoss.org/maven2/org/zkoss/zk/zk/
Why are there no releases if they are announced on the font page? As a new developer, I'd just turn around a look for something else.
I've been working with ZK for years now. For a new project, I'd definitly have a look at other frameworks. Especially the arrival of Shadow Elements which are EE only made this clear to me. They are used in a lot examples now and finally provide the way a developer wants to code the zul. Its a too simple requirement to have a <if test="">
in your markup, you don't want to pay for this.
Long story short, ZK isn't a traditional open source project. Pay for it and you get a good product. The free version is rather a by-product, so is the whole open source community around it.
Asked: 2011-03-31 18:24:26 +0800
Seen: 3,400 times
Last updated: May 24 '17