UI technologies for Java EE applications

Question

I need some guidance from the experts.

Till now I have worked on Java and Java EE stuff along with Unix scripting etc. But everything was on the backend side. So I never actually touched the UI code much other than occasional cosmetic changes.

But now I have got one project where we need to work on the frontend part as well.

As I learnt from my colleagues, we need to know CSS, Html, Javascript, XSLT/XPath etc to make a good user friendly UI.

So could you kindly guide as to where to start. I feel that there are lot of things put together.

I tried to read up these things separately e.g. CSS thru W3C , Javascript thru W3C and I understood them but when it comes putting all of these together I am faltering. Require your suggestions to overcome this

Answer 1

I guess you are mostly interested in web applications development. In any case, it's good to know CSS (mainly CSS3) and HTML (preferably HTML 5) as well as a javascript library such as jQuery. Regarding the web frameworks to start with. Here are some choices. You may look around to see their pros and cons. So, here they are some of these:

JSF 2.0 is a brilliant framework following the Model View Controller pattern, that can be combined with an off the shelf javascript component library for JSF such as richfaces, primefaces, icefaces to give you a Rich Internet Application experience.

Groovy on Grails is also an excellent framework enabling you to write also in Groovy, starting usually from the domain layer and creating automatically a scaffold to work with - Similarly, Ruby on Rails offers the possibility to work with Ruby.

Spring MVC is also a great and popular framework to work with.

Django Python is a popular framework for writing in python, "Play!" framework to work with scala and many more.

So, choose the flavor you prefer and try delving into its details. Hope I have helped you.

Answer 2

If you are using Java EE, there's already a good UI framework available in that stack called JSF.

A good text to get started with it is JSF 2.0 tutorial with Eclipse and Glassfish