If I don't use Drupal CMS, how can I make the UI look nice?

I am not a designer, but as I understand it, Drupal gives really great tools to make the UI look very cool.

If I use a non-PHP language to program, I sort of lose the opportunity to use Drupal, correct?

I mean, if I use Java, what equivalent choice of a great CMS do I have?

In a way, it seems that开发者_StackOverflow社区 if you use CMS, UI will suck. And if you do not use CMS, UI will probably also be a headache because you didn't use a CMS.

When should I use it and when should I avoid it?

As I was trying to say in How to make Drupal on Apache work together with Tomcat?, wanting a nice UI is not a reason to use a CMS like Drupal IMHO.

Yes, Drupal comes with a fairly good looking UI by default (And I'm sure many will disagree with that) and it provides tools (which can be very complex, especially for designer without programming experience) to customize it.

However, to get a really good looking UI customized for a given site (with few to many contributed and custom modules enabled), you will have to invest a lot of time and often work against whatever Drupal provides by default to get it to look exactly like you want.

You choose a CMS like Drupal for the functionality it provides, which means that you can click 80% of the functional requirements for typical sites together or that you can often more easily maintain the content of a site (or actually your customer).

If you just want a "cool looking" UI, you can get that with whatever backend you have, be it a PHP CMS like Drupal, a blog software like WordPress, a Java CMS like Liferay, custom web applications written in PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, .NET, ... or even static pages. After all, all of these options result in HTML, CSS and JS when "the UI" reaches the browser.

It just takes more or less time (And to that time contribute many factors, like personal experience or the actual requirements of a desired site), so the best way to get that "cool looking UI" is not even always the same.

It depends what you're trying to do exactly. If you're trying to develop an applet or something in Java, you may still be able to build the site in a PHP-CMS like Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress. It would just be a matter of embedding the applet in a particular page of the site. However, if you're trying to use Java as a server-side language to process and serve content for the website, you're basically rewriting the core of the CMS anyway. In this case, you might as well just pick a good HTML/CSS page template (there's heaps of HTML/CSS, non-CMS templates available online) to build pages from and tell your Java program to return the markup from the template, but modified slightly, with a particular content div containing your generated content (maybe some database records you grabbed in the Java backend). This way your UI is taken care of and you can still do your content processing in Java.

Another solution may be to write your application in Java and then develop a PHP plugin for Drupal or similar to form a bridge between the CMS and the application.