ZK is a highly productive Java framework for building amazing enterprise web and mobile applications.
ZK is renowned for its "Ajax without JavaScript" approach since 2005, enabling developers to build rich internet applications transparently without any knowledge of Ajax and JavaScript.
The client engine and update engine in ZK play the roles of pitcher and catcher, rendering Ajax communication transparent to developers. Events triggered by users are encapsulated and marshalled to event listeners running at the server.
User interface rendered on browsers are surrogated on the server as POJO components, alternation made on the POJO components are reflected to the client transparently.
With programs executed at the server, developers can leverage all the Java technologies, such as Java EE and Spring, while back-end data and services are readily available.
ZK's Server+client Fusion gives developers the freedom to leverage the best of both sides.
The server-centric solution to Ajax brings a productivity boost, robustness, and security to Web application development; while client side solutions endows Web applications with greater controllability and the ability to leverage client side resources.
ZK marries the benefits of both to bring forth a developer-centric approach where developers continue to build large scale enterprise applications with all the robustness of Java technologies, but also are offered the flexibility to work directly with ZK's jQuery based widgets to further enhance user experience.
ZK User Interface Markup Language (ZUML) makes the design of rich user interfaces as simple as authoring HTML pages. ZUML is a variant of XUL inheriting all features available to XML, and separates the UI definition from the run-time logic.
ZUML also allows developers to automate CRUD between UI components and the data source with annotations, data binding and MVVM.