kallasoft

This past week ZKoss refreshed their flagship product, ZK, to version 3.5.1. If you haven’t heard of ZK before, it is a very slick framework which was “designed to maximize enterprise operation efficiency and minimize the development cost [with] its groundbreaking Direct RIA architecture. ”

Unlike most marketing ploys used to overstate the capabilities of a particular product, ZK seems to match enterprise needs and costs by giving the developer easy-to-use tools to create spectacular interfaces in a very short time. Of course it is easy for me to say this, but when you have a chance to check ZK out you’ll probably be left wondering why you weren’t using it before.

As mentioned before, ZK is marketed as a powerful Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, and this framework is not limited to a particular language. In other words, ZK allows developers to code and deploy their website in a variety of programming languages like Java, Groovy, Ruby, Python, and JavaScript.

[smartads] On top of that, the technology is built on open standards and has over 170 “off-the-shelf state-of-art Ajax Components” that can be accessed by any one of the aforementioned languages with only a few lines a code. The previous statement doesn’t nearly do the justice this framework requires, so check out the quick flash movie on the learn page to get an idea; a quick example would be adding the <gmaps/> tag to embed a Google Maps component or or <fckeditor/> tag to embed the venerable FCKEditor WYSIWYG HTML Editor.

This particular release was a minor update but still managed to contain “over 6 new features” and “28 bugs were fixed.” The headliners are:

• Changing font size/family with system properties
• A New Tree Style (think Windows Explorer)
• Support for Session Fixation Protection
• Extendlet supports Filters
• Added support for bookmark-able and resumable downloads
• Components.addForward can now handle casecade $ name patterns.

If you would like to learn more, head on over to the ZK product page or to the release notes for 3.5.1 here.

There is also a NetBeans 6.1 plugin available that adds ZK Framework support for Web Projects with an enhanced design palette that allows you to quickly drag and drop ZK components into your web page like CAPTCHA box, FCKEditor, Google Maps, File Upload and ZK Tree components… along with a lot of other FCK components.

There is a tutorial done by Ayman Elgharabawy here, that shows you how to get started with the NetBeans ZK plugin incase you wanted to try it out.

Check it out, and let us know what you think!