What are my options for building a rich web application?

I'm working on a client-side Java application for whi开发者_JAVA百科ch I want to create a web-based user interface (which will be served up to a browser from the local app). At the risk of oversimplifying, its a microblogging tool that will support functionality similar to Twitter and Facebook. Its open source, and you can read more on our wiki.

Its important that this app is extremely easy to use, and I also want it to look good relative to contemporary web applications (such as the examples available on the Chrome web store). Since I am not a web designer, I'm hoping to use tools that give me an attractive UI "out of the box". Oh, and I need to keep the distributable file reasonably small (un him so whatever I use needs to be reasonably lightweight.

So far, I've looked at Sproutcore and GWT.

Sproutcore apps definite have the appearance I'm hoping for, but I'm not that familiar with JavaScript, and after some experimentation is not entirely clear to me how I will achieve some of the more sophisticated functionality that I think I'm going to need.

Being Java, GWT is more within my comfort zone, however I had a hell of a time just getting my development environment set up properly. It seems that GWT wants to dictate the structure of my application, but since the user interface is only a small part of it I'm not willing to build the entire app around GWT.

Something else I've been thinking about is using CoffeeScript (which seems more palatable him and him him him him him than JavaScript, and there are Maven builders for it), perhaps together with JQuery-UI.

What other options should I consider?

To recommend two big javascript frameworks Sencha and Cappuccino.

These have an extensive UI toolkit out of the box. The latter has an MVC framework build in, the former has a general JavaScript library build in. Both come highly recommended.

Also as recommended jQuery UI is a reasonable toolkit. I would personally couple Sencha for its rich UI toolkit and a lightweight MVC framework like Backbone. I'm afraid this does require learning JavaScript well.

You can also instead drive your JavaScript UI toolkit mainly from the server and skip the clientside MVC. For that sencha should surfice as a UI toolkit, but if you want meaningful functionality you will need some more structure. I would also recommend RequireJS for modular file management.

Take a look on Vaadin its based on GWT but simpler to use. I use it since 2 years and i'am not a designer too.

Take a look at jQuery & jQuery UI (jQuery Modile if you are looking to deploy to hand held devices)

Also, since you mentioned that you are not a designer, you might want to implement the front end in an MVVM pattern to separate the UI from the business logic of your applications. Knockout is a nice way to do with with decelerative data binding

I don't like writing plain JavaScript, so I'll tell you little bit about Java based frameworks. Recently, I've picked Google Web Toolkit.

Pros:

• plenty of materials
• Eclipse + Google plugin
• Very intuitive API
• 3rd party libraries
• Fancy widgets + optimized JavaScript
• lot of generics
• very active community
• awesome async callbacks

Cons:

• very slow debugging, that will drive you mad sooner or later
• lot of deprecated code for so young framework

Mixed feelings:

• You don't have to write declarative UI (you can do Swing-like development), but your code grows bigger and less maintainable, so it is quite probable that you'll eventually learn some declarative UI like UI Binder
• Visual designer for GWT is somehow nice, but very unstable (eclipse) :(

Some considerations:

Do some prototyping with Vaadin. Try some debugging. Then try GWT and debugging on similar sized project. Consider debugging as the VERY important decision factor, because GWT debugging was the most frustrating thing for me.

Consider JSF + some nice rich component framework for JSF like RichFaces, IceFaces, PrimeFaces etc (but you app won't be "light" and "small" anymore if you really care). Be sure to be perfectly comfortable with environment (IDE + plugins), nothing beats JSF there (I'd pick RichFaces + Seam today, if full Java EE is option).

If you don't want to learn javascript I recommend you GWT with Sencha-GWT (GXT), you can develop all your app in java language, and also debug your code in java.

It is very easy to create a web app with this technology, and provides almost all funcionality available in javascript version.

Also you can mix it with hibernate and giled to persist your data, and giled helps you to serialize hibernate objects.

I have been writing an application in SproutCore for the front-end and a Java backend. In my mind this works perfectly.

The backend can stop worrying about HTML and JavaScript contents on the client side, if the request is XHR or plain request/response. I can implement the backends using plain old Java Servlets, and only worry about the data that is passed between the client and the server (JSON for the most part).

The client becomed fast and responsive, and SproutCore has a rich amount of components that you can mix and match.

So in other words with SproutCore (and Cappuccino and other full-blows MVC JavaScript frameworks) you can let your client do what it does best : Render and display HTML, CSS and JavaScript, while leaving your server to worry about what it does best: retrieve, store and update data. If you are interested, the source code for this project is available with the GPLv3 licence: https://github.com/joachimhs/EurekaJ

I have written an article about the differnt approaches between server-side MVC and client-side MVC here: http://haagen.name/2011/05/24/The_RIA_MVC_Model.html.

Also SproutCore comes with the MIT licence, so its avaiable for use without (m)any restrictions.