Ruby Weekly is a weekly newsletter covering the latest Ruby and Rails news.

ZK: Rich Web Applications Supporting Ruby Scripting

By Hendy Irawan / May 10, 2007

ZK is a popular open source Ajax framework written in Java. It simplifies rich web applications by treating the browser as a simple display server, which reduces the need to have lots of application logic. It's Java, so why it's in RubyInside?

The interesting part here is that recent versions of ZK (version 2.3.1 as of this writing) support more languages for its ZUML markup, in addition to Java: JavaScript, Groovy, and Ruby. ZUML is an XML-based markup language to create user interfaces very similar to the desktop GUI component/event driven model.

Being Java, ZK's Ruby engine is powered by JRuby, which is already quite mature. With the recent announcement of Microsoft Silverlight technology (which also supports Ruby), this can only mean wider adoption of the Ruby language in many aspects.

(One particular note: both Rails and ZK use Script.aculo.us as their visual effects JavaScript library.)

About Hendy Irawan

Ruby programmer from Indonesia. View all posts by Hendy Irawan →

Comments

  1. Rajesh says:

    Hendy Irawan wrote :
    Being Java, ZK's Ruby engine is powered by JRuby, which is already quite mature.

    Hendy Irawan must have somked "something" that I would like to "smoke". JRuby is mature?? huh?? Have you deployed application on Jruby? Do it before you promote it.

    Thanks

  2. Peter Cooper says:

    It's all relative, but even ThoughtWorks are deploying a commercial app on JRuby.

    http://studios.thoughtworks.com/2007/5/7/mingle-to-run-on-jruby

    They claim "JRuby is ready for prime time!"

    Depends on whether you see mature as having been around and proven a long time.. or in the sense of "finally mature". ThoughtWorks (and Hendy) seem to take the latter view.

  3. Hendy Irawan says:

    Dear Rajesh,

    I agree with you that to decide which solution fits best for our clients, we must conduct a thorough research and testing first. This applies to any kind of technology, even old ones and, especially new ones as you said.

  4. Pingback: Java, Please! Stirred, Not Shaken

  5. Pingback: Java, Please! Stirred, Not Shaken

Other Posts to Enjoy

Twitter Mentions