Agile Ajax

Widget Watch - Echo2 Widget Panel

Dietrich Kappe, Wednesday, July 5, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Well it's happened. Down in the ferment that is the Echo2 Developer Forums, developers are contributing reusable components to the Echo2 framework. Beyond the EchopointNG components, lots of other developers have been throwing their hats in the ring. One fellow took a look at the new google home page and thought that a draggable, animated component panel like that would be a good thing for Echo2. He announced his component panel on the Echo2 development forum. Here's a screenshot of a demo in action:

echo2comp.JPG

I've put up the demo for those who want to test it out for themselves. (It's not my demo, i.e. I didn't write it, I'm just putting it up.)

A few words about the demo. To use it, click the "Add Widget" text at the top to add widgets, then drag them around. Use the other buttons to change the behaviour of the panel. OK, have at it.


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agile ajax Agile Ajax

Comments: 2 so far

  1. Echo2 needs more excellent press like this. It’s really a shame this framework doesn’t get as much advertising as other ones do. I have no idea why ZK gets so much love; imo Echo is stronger in so many ways.

    Comment by Ivan, Thursday, July 6, 2006 @ 8:02 am

  2. I like ZK and Echo. I am a Swing developer. However ZK just seems so much more flexible and capable. I’m sure it also depends on what your needs are. Some developers are creating internal systems - others may be trying to AJAXify public web apps. With Echo2, it seems like the focus is primarily in creating desktop-feeling webapps. With ZK, you get to choose. Also with ZK, you can assemble pages either directly in Java code or using ZK’s XUL markup syntax which basically wraps XHTML - but you can embed HTML as well easily. ZK also offers integration with JSP, possibly JSF in the future, Groovy, BeanShell, JRuby, etc.

    Also, I posted a question on the forum which actually ended up being a feature request and one of the admins Henri added it for me as a feature request. They are very receptive and not defensive like some other framework designers. Here is what I asked: I asked whether it was possible to create components for rendering but be able to specify that certain trees of components are static, e.g. that the components will be need to remain in memory on the server because they will no longer be interacted with via AJAX/events. I see lack of this this as a possible memory optimization drawback with ZK - but they listened and added a feature request.

    ZK is very flexible, easy to use and well designed. Most other tag based Java component frameworks would develop the framework api as a bunch of tags. These guys are smart, have created an API which can be used directly in Java and they use a separate mechanism to wrap the API as XUL markup. This allows the developer to render pages as a combination of pure Java code or XUL markup or XHTML and mix it up as necessary or desired.

    Thumbs up!

    Comment by Philip Weaver, Sunday, April 15, 2007 @ 3:46 pm

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