Looking for a good book on web development? Well, over at Nettuts they have put together a good list of 50 good books. So, if you are looking for a good book on web development this list should have quite a few good suggestions.

Below is an excerpt from the list.

Frameworks

8. Agile Web Development with Rails

Ever since Rails took the development world by storm a few years back, there has been plenty written about the Ruby framework. But you can't find a much better resource than one written by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson.

9. Python Web Development with Django

Django is an excellent python framework, and one that is highly respected in the development community. Python Web Development with Django is 400 pages of excellent techniques and tutorials for learning django development.

10. Professional CodeIgniter

CodeIgnitor is a PHP-based framework that has shown excellent promise amongst other frameworks. Professional CodeIgnitor gives an overview of MVC programming, and outlines how to build excellent web applications with CodeIgnitor.

11. Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional

Beginning CakePHP: From Novice to Professional is a handy paperback for beginners trying to learn the MVC-based framework, but also, as the name implies, is highly useful for an intermediate or advanced CakePHP programmer. The book claims it's geared for...

...an audience of developers already familiar with PHP but who may not be PHP experts. This book is tailored for those new to CakePHP and who want a thorough tutorial.

You can read the full post here.

The new 'empty client' approach lead by Visual WebGui to AJAX is set to offer fundamental, infrastructure solutions to the three major setbacks of AJAX listed bellow. This approach shifts all processing, including UI logic to server, much like the old Main Frame paradigm did, and leaves the web client empty.

The first setback of traditional AJAX is the complexity in creating AJAX application for enterprise's scenarios which is time consuming and therefore brings doubtful ROI. The second setback is that there is a lack of AJAX technologies that can support high level data centric enterprise applications. The last but not least in importance, is security concerns as AJAX is known to raise real security concerns which enterprise applications with sensitive data cannot tolerate.

If the client is empty, everything is processed on the server. This concept enables highly productive, desktop development methodologies for web development as well as allowing complex applications running responsively on the network. Finally, since there is no data, no logic and no open services on the client, this approach presents a highly secured alternative to conventional client-side AJAX.

You can read more about the design time and runtime advantages of the 'empty client' AJAX on VisualWebGui.com

After two years of development, the first serious contender to challenge Ruby on Rails in the area of Ruby web application frameworks has reached 1.0 status: Merb. Created by Ezra Zugmuntowicz, Merb is built to be lightweight, less monolithic than Rails--i.e., you have your own choice of ORM, JavaScript, and templating frameworks--as well as thread-safe (which Rails, prior to the upcoming version 2.2 at least, was not).

You can get the gem from RubyForge with (something like) the following :

$ sudo gem install merb --include-dependencies


(Alternative site: —source http://edge.merbivore.com)

You can then generate your first Merb project and run it with the following:

$ merb-gen app my_application
$ cd my_application
$ merb


Then, of course, you'll want to read the documentation.

JS Strict Data Types Beta version 1.1 has just been released. The new release fixes various bugs that where found in the initial release. The biggest fix was one that caused the string and integer data types to not be kept correctly in certain situations.

Any code that you may have written using the library should work with no code changes. So, we recommend that anybody using the initial release start using this new release.

You can go to our Google Code page here.

You can download the new version here.

There may be times when you have a table that you want users to be able to sort. In some cases it will make sense to have the table sorted on the server side, however for smaller tables it may be useful to have a script sort it on the client. Well, over at the Leigeber Web Development Blog they have posted a nice small script that accomplishes just that.

below is an excerpt from the post.

This JavaScript table sorting script is easy to use, fast and lightweight at only 1.7KB. It includes alternate row formatting, header class toggling, auto data type recognition and selective column sorting. It will currently sort strings, numbers and currency. More features will follow.

You can read the full story here.

You can see a demo here.

You can download the source code here.

With devices like the iPhone and many of the new touch computer monitors we are using traditional keyboards less and less. Add this to the fact that when many people are on the go they use public computers with possible security threats like keyloggers. With these trends in computing you may look at putting a virtual keyboard in your web applications (where it makes sense). Well, over at Design Shack they have put together a nice example of this using jQuery (although you could take the same concept and use a different library).

Below is an excerpt from the post.

For those of us who travel often, we often end up accessing our emails and other confidential web accounts on public computers. In such circumstances, we are completely at the mercy of keyloggers and other malicious software that track our keystrokes and record our passwords.

Yet, very few websites provide their users with the option of using a virtual keyboard to key in (at the bare minimum) their passwords. Yes, a few banks do it, but considering how much personal information we store in various web applications these days, the safety of these accounts are of no less significance to us. This tutorial will explain how we can implement a simple virtual keyboard with some (well, okay, lots of!) help from jQuery.

You can read the full post here.

Google has announced the introduction of some powerful visualizations for your server-side data. They have publicly documented the Google Visualization API's open-wire protocol (you can go to the documentation here). The API has been greatly expanded from when it first launched and can now expose server-side data, such as SQL databases and even Excel spreadsheets, and display this data through visualizations from their growing directory.

Below is an excerpt from the post.

To make it even easier for developers to get started, we have documented an open-source Python library that enables any Python developer to quickly start using the API. What we find particularly cool about this library is that it also runs on Google's AppEngine. You don't even need to be an owner of your own servers to expose your data: You can place it on AppEngine and use the Visualization API to expose your data in meaningful, insightful ways in dashboards and reports. Expect to see additional server-side tools for the Visualization API in the near future.

You can read the full post here.

For those following dependency injection frameworks in Java, Google Guice has released its beta snapshot (stamped 2008-10-16) for Guice 2.0.

What's coming in Guice 2.0?

• A tree-like structure for Injectors, i.e., an Injector can have children that inherit all of its bindings.
• An introspection API: like reflection but for Guice bindings.
• The ability to inject members of sets and maps using Multibinder and MapBinder respectively.
• Private modules.
• Pluggable type converters that convert constant string bindings to other types, i.e., Dates, URLs, etc.
• And more...

The official word is now that Guice 2.0 will be released in Fall 2008. (The Id Software release schedule: it'll be done when it's done!)

The minor release with major features, Java 6 Update 10 brought a host of improvements to the long-neglected Java applet. One of these improvements was better interoperability with JavaScript, which was delivered to the new Java plug-in in the form of LiveConnect technology. As Sun's entrant into the RIA race, JavaFX, comes closer to a 1.0 release, such interoperability is crucial to the success of this effort.

While it has always been possible (to a certain extent) to call between an applet and JavaScript running the same browser, LiveConnect vastly improves the technology by

• Improving reliability. A number of bugs involving the stability of the browser when making JavaScript<-->Java calls have been fixed.
• Improving performance. Dramatically better performance...always a good thing.
• Making it more consistent across different browsers. Support for JavaScript interoperability was always a little better on Mozilla browsers, but now the functionality is more consistent across different browsers with the new plug-in.
• Increasing the functionality. It's now possible to instantiate new Java objects from JavaScript, call methods on them, as well as reference third-party packages on all browsers.

Calling Java from JavaScript

The following code shows how to invoke methods on an applet through JavaScript:

Java:

package org.example;

public class MyApplet extends Applet {
     public String getMessage() {
          return "Hello World!";
     }
}

HTML/JavaScript:

<applet id="myApp" archive="helloworld.jar" code="org.example.MyApplet"/>

<script type="text/javascript">
     var msg = myApp.getMessage();
     alert(msg);
</script>

Public fields in the Java class can also be called from JavaScript, as well as static fields and methods. Due to a new synthetic keyword, Packages, that is now attached to every applet, it is now possible to instantiate/call methods on classes that are not applets. For example, if we add a new class in the org.example package,

package org.example;

public class MyNonApplet {
     public String getOtherMessage() {
          return "This is NOT a hello world!";
     }
}

we can now create an instance of this class from the JavaScript and do things with it. Using the example above, let's modify the script a little:

<script type="text/javascript">
     var other = new myApp.Packages.org.example.MyNonApplet();
     alert(other.getOtherMessage());
</script>

This opens up the intriguing possibility of accessing a rich set of Java APIs from client-side JavaScript. Take, for example, the ability to add SVG support in (ahem) the only major browser that does not support it*. With Apache Batik and the Java plug-in, full support of SVG in the browser--SVG JavaScript API and all--becomes a reality. (Batik 1.7, by the way, is one of the most compliant implementations of SVG. And SVG might just be a faster way into the web designer's heart than JavaFX, but I digress...)

Each time a call into an applet is made from JavaScript, it is handled by a worker thread that is associated with the applet (there is only one per applet).

Calling JavaScript from Java

All instances of JavaScript objects within Java code appear as instances of netscape.javascript.JSObject. There are essentially two ways of invoking JavaScript from Java:

1. Calling the static JSObject.getWindow(Applet arg) method with the applet object passed in as an argument. This method returns a JSObject that represents the DOM Window. This JSObject can in turn be used to call() JavaScript functions or eval() JavaScript code. The API for JSObject is here.
2. Add a method in your Java code that takes JSObject as a formal parameter. Communication can then be bootstrapped from the JavaScript side by calling this Java method and passing a JavaScript object as an argument. It's a little less convenient than option 1, but useful if some JavaScript code wants to delegate some work to the Java code.

Furthermore, you can actually modify the HTML DOM from the Java side using a common DOM API. For the purposes of compiling Java code written with references to JSObject, you would place the jre/lib/plugin.jar on your classpath. Note also that, since JavaScript is a single-threaded language, communication from Java to JavaScript is restricted to one thread at a time; so you should structure your code accordingly.

Other JVM Languages

Of course, the other interesting possibility is the idea of languages like Scala, JRuby, Groovy, Clojure, or Fan being able to run in the browser with support for JavaScript interaction. A truly sick mind (and you know who you are) might use the applet merely as a trojan horse in order to get his/her favorite language running in the browser. I'll leave it at that!

Sun's renewed interest in the applet--sparked in part by RIA and in no small way by the resurgence of alternative browsers--has opened a door many thought closed a long time ago. Interesting times, indeed.

* Even worse now that the Adobe SVG plug-in has been discontinued.

Title: ZK Developer's Guide
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Authors: Markus Stauble and Hans-Jurgen Schumacher
Publish Date: March, 2008

Some Background

The ZK framework, created by Tom Yeh, started out life as a project on Sourceforge, where it quickly became a popular open-source project (nominated for the 2006 Sourceforge.net Community Choice Award). It has since moved to its own site (but continues to distribute files through Sourceforge), where it vies for share with other AJAX frameworks in the RIA market. The project is officially sponsored by the Potix Corporation, which provides consulting services for ZK. It is distributed under both GNU and commercial licenses.

ZK is a thin-client Java- and XML-based component framework which uses JavaScript underneath the covers to communicate between the (browser-based) client and server.

• ZK uses its own extension of Mozilla's XUL library, ZUML, to describe the page components, which are then rendered into the appropriate HTML and JavaScript by the ZK engine. ZK can also use XHTML-based components.
• Scripting is handled using Java and EL expressions.
• Communication between the client and server is based on an event model: user interaction is propagated (via AJAX) back to the server, which may modify the client DOM in response to the event, passing back those modifications (via AJAX) to the framework's client-side JavaScript, which handles them. The server keeps its own hierarchy of ZK components which correspond to the browser's DOM.

There is a resemblance here to other "JavaScript-less" AJAX frameworks, notably GWT and the JSF-based ICEFaces.

The Book

Like many of Packt's books, the format is focused on being lightweight and easy to read. There are 7 chapters and 159 pages, but the pages are small and have plenty of whitespace (presumably for adding notes). Add to that an abundance of illustrations and screenshots, and you get the idea: it can easily be consumed in a day or two.

The emphasis of the book is on learning the framwork, not really serving as a reference (the authors refer you to the online documentation for that), so the book generally assumes the form of a "walk-through" of the framework with an emphasis on the "Online Media Library" example application (chapters 2-4). A general breakdown of the book is as follows:

• Chapter 1, Getting Started With ZK, is an introduction to the framework with a definition of terms, description of underlying technologies, the obligatory "Hello World" in ZK, as well as an in-depth treatment of how the framework functions (events, phases, component creation).
• Chapter 2, Online Media Library, is a quick overview of the example application, how to set up the project in Eclipse (as a Maven project), and develop the basic application pages using ZUML. It does not discuss ZK-Bench (the subject of Ch. 7) presumably to focus on the technology itself, rather than the tools.
• Chapter 3, Extending the Online Media Library, goes more into the full capability of the framework, turning the example application into a full MVC (Model-View-Controller)-based application and introducing "Live Data" (AJAX) in order to make the application more desktop-like.
• Chapter 4, Is It on the Desktop or the Web?, continues where Ch. 3 left off, adding Drag-and-Drop capability to the application, embedding the rich text editor FCKEditor into ZK, and covering internationalization.
• Chapter 5, Integration with Other Frameworks, covers integrating the ZK framework with other popular frameworks and technologies, including Spring, Hibernate, Jasper Reports, mobile phones (ZK mobile), and even JSF (ZK's JSF components).
• Chapter 6, Creating Custom Components, shows you how to create custom ZK components for your application.
• Chapter 7, Development Tools for the ZK Framework, covers how to install and use the Eclipse-based ZK-Bench development environment.

The Good

ZK Developer's Guide strikes a good balance between approachability and depth, and as such is a good introduction to the framework for developers not wishing to be overwhelmed by details. It is a simple and quick read with an emphasis on practical development that will be especially useful to developers without any previous RIA or AJAX development experience. The provided Online Media Library example is simple enough for illustrative purposes with enough functionality to demonstrate the framework's functionality.

The Bad

On the downside, the book lacks coverage of many of the built-in widgets that come with the ZK framework (audio controls, slider, progress meter, charts, etc.); granted, its stated intention is not to serve as a reference, but it seems a strange omission for a book about an AJAX framework. Much of the discussion around integrating with other frameworks in Ch. 5 also seems a bit thin (outside of Spring).

Conclusion

ZK Developer's Guide is a good book for those wishing to get up and running with the ZK framework quickly. Though it does not include much detail on the framework's built-in widgets, this can easily be supplemented by ZK's own online documentation.