ZK Roadmap for 2007

Tom Yeh over at the ZK project has released his roadmap for 2007. It's an intriguing list of tools, features, and developer support:

• Expanded support for data binding.
• A visual design tool for Eclipse.
• Support from mobile platforms: ZK Mobile, a Java ME client, will be released in the first half of 2007.
• To work with existing applications more efficiently, ZK components will be available in the form of JSP tags. Maybe also as JSF components.
• Support for browsers without Javascript.
• Support for other scripting languages than Java, such as Groovy and Ruby.
• ZK books and more online tutorials.
• "Mega" components, such as spreadsheets, forums, etc.

Lots of good stuff, especially the news about ZK Mobile and the visual design tool.

One thing I'd like to see happen with ZK (and Echo2, the other, similar server-side framework), is the development of something similar to the Spring Rich Client framework. What is Spring Rich Client?

The Spring Rich Client Project (RCP) is a sub-project of The Spring Framework. Spring-RCP's mission is to provide an elegant way to build highly-configurable, GUI-standards-following rich-client applications faster by leveraging the Spring Framework, and a rich library of UI factories and support classes. Initial focus is on providing support for Swing applications but a goal of Spring-RCP is to be view agnostic as much as possible.

Both ZK and Echo2 resemble desktop GUI frameworks, and thus could benefit in the same way as Swing. In fact, if Spring-RCP is truly view agnostic, it might make sense to try to use Spring-RCP directly.

source: ajaxian.com