UI Development/Framework Recommendation - jquery-ui

I waste a lot development time on UI related tasks. General things like navigation and forms layout really bog me down.
I have been researching various JavaScript Frameworks that can be used to UI design. I've looked at jQuery UI, MochaUI, Sencha (formerly Ext JS) and few others but they all seem to be lacking.
I would love to find something that really simplifies UI development.
Any recommendations?

ExtJS,Dojotoolkit, jQuery UI really makes UI coding easier..
ExtJS even have their designer application to make UI development easy. What do you feel they are lacking?

Related

Phonegap and the universe of frameworks?

my concern is to find a well fitting framework for developing a cross mobile platform app via phonegap. I am using JQMobile for the User interface.
I want to build my Application well structured and modular. That means i want to keep it very well capsulated.
I know Backbone.js , Underscore.js , handlebar.js , Mustache.js.... and many more.
I am wondering what could be the best method of structuring my apps architecture?! Moreover: Are there big dependencies which result from using those frameworks?
Which framework is giving me the BEST expandability and performance Boosts?
Iam asking because i hope someone can give me a hint. That would save much time.
Greetings
Chris.
EDIT: USEFUL Information for readers.
My final decision is based on "http://coenraets.org/blog/phonegap-tutorial/". This is a Tutorial about developing a Phonegap Application. Christophe Coenraets is a Technical Evangelist from Adobe. He gives many advices how to develop Phonegap applications with good performance. The link directs you to a really nice Tutorial for Routing between Views, Css Scrolling with Phonegap and many architectural information more. There is also a 60 minute presentation about Performance / Architecture and more similiar stuff. I am using handlebars.js for HTML templating, fastclick.js to simulate "touch" for "click" for more performance and Twitter Bootstrap CSS Framework for the responsive Design.
Anyway thx for your answers!
First lets make something clear. Whatever you use, you will not gain performance boost. Even worse, there's a good chance your performances will be lower.
But what you will get is usability and readability + more functional code than it is the case with pure jQuery + jQuery Mobile.
The most commonly used combination is jQuery Mobile + Backbone + Require.js. From my experience, it is also the best one. Unfortunately, in the end, I think you will be disappointed. While this is an excellent combination, jQuery Mobile applications are usually slugish on Phonegap. So think about it.
I have several other articles discussing similar topic so take a look:
Switching from Jquery Mobile to AppFramework
Which mobile development open source Framework should I use?

Which is more customizable between jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch in terms of UI?

I am an iOS developer with decent experience, After a lot of decsion making, we have coome to a conclusion of using phoneGap for our next project which is suppose to be a multi platform app.
Now the question is what to use with PhoneGap, Sencha and jQuery Mobile?
I visited old posts at SO,Quora and a lot of blogs and came to a conclusion that, jQuery Mobile is good to start and learn but Sencha is much more powerful in terms of controls,MVC on client and extensibility.
I have used jquery,jquery plugins and ExtJS in the past and I am fine with either of their mobile counterparts .
So coming to the point, Our application will be designed by a designer who will not know what we will be using to make the app.
he will give us wireframes of the application and slices for images to put on buttons,tab bars etc.
This is how our standard iOS design process works.
So which of the two frameworks will suit this kind of development style where I will be able to replicate the UI given by the designer.
Coming from iOS, Sencha Touch might be a little closer to what you're used to. Having had a little iOS experience, I feel like ST has a much closer layout system. jQuery Mobile would be best if the implementor is used to building things for the browser.
I think both are equally customizable. Having that said ST provides more built in components and hooks whereas jqm wants you to do more on your own. Both frameworks differ extremely in their approach. Jqm uses a declarative designer friendly approach whereas ST uses an OOP programmer friendly approach.

Icesfaces vs Myfaces vs Primefaces

I am starting out a new project that involves the use of JSF 2.0.
From my initial reading, the Mojarra and Apache Implementation of the
project covers the basic components that you will need.
But I know that user's would seek gui with better presentation such as
panel tab, accordion, slider etc... Currently, there are other implementation that I am seeing, the Primefaces, RichFaces and Icefaces.
But I cant find a good article that discusses which among the three are the best.
I have used Spring MVC before but I use JqueryUI for those widget.
Now that I am into component based framework, I would like to use the best JSF Implementation.
I would like to know metrics such as performance/interoperability/ease of use/support.
Sorry if my question might be vague but I would like to hear comments before I select my JSF Vendor Implementation.
Thanks.
I happily use Primefaces as it is by far the most rich set of open source JSF2 controls out there, but they can be infuriatingly buggy at times. It is best to operate under the assumption that component X will not work correctly in a dialog without heavy tinkering.
I would avoid Primefaces if you operate in a development environment with strict UI design requirements as getting everything exactly the way you would like it to look and operate may not be a possibility.
Further I would avoid Primefaces if you are not comfortable with JSF, HTML, JQuery, JavaScript and CSS as you will need a good bit of JQuery trickery to work around the bugs that crop up.
But on that note, I haven't run into a problem yet that a couple lines of custom Javascript haven't fixed for me, and I have one of the most feature rich applications I have ever wrote in the shortest amount of time.
The speed of development is very fast in this area, and any article gets outdated quickly. I used Primefaces for a new project almost a year ago, because at that time it was the only one that was fully compatible with JSF 2 (both Icefacves and Richfaces have had JSF 2 compatible releases in the meantime).
Primefaces has a lot of powerful components that automatically use AJAX, and even more were added in version 3. Unfortunately this focus on new features led to a lot of bugs, but the developers said they would focus on bugfixing after release 3; I can't say anything about the current status since I left the project after 3 months.
There is one thing against Icefaces: a lot of components and functionality are only available in the Enterprise version, which is commercial, not free (but that might as well be a good thing since you get support etc. if your project can afford it).
Why not play with all three libs for a short time, build a simple project and see how you are getting along with either of them. My personal taste prefers Primefaces, but I haven't tried Richfaces since it turned JSF 2 ready.
I have successfully used JBoss RichFaces on a large online B2B store. RichFaces is a quite good framework for building webapps Web 2.0 style, and have easy to use tags that help you develop features faster.
I do not have any metrics regarding performance between RichFaces and IceFaces/Primefaces, but the ease of development should be approximately the same. All three frameworks have similar components, and they are all working towards more and more logic on the client via JavaScript.
At the current state of the JSF libraries, I am fairly sure that you will be happy with whichever framework your choose. IMO RichFaces and IceFaces are the two frameworks that have been around the longest, and i would put my bet on one of these two. IIRC both frameworks have key developers in the JSF design group as well.
As a general rule of thumb, these framework should work interoperably, but I wouldn't mix and match between them. The frameworks are really ment to be used on their own.

Blackberry custom UI and custom Components

I have been working quite sometime with Blackberry application development but customizing UI and components is something am not very familiar with. I understand that the sublayout, paint, getpreferredWidth, getpreferredHeight methods are to be overridden to customize layouts and components. But still the idea is very vague to me. I am still not able to confidently proceed with the development of UI using these concepts. Can someone explain to me the basics of this? I would like to have a clear understanding from the experts out there.
Best thing to do is look at the source code to the Advanced UI Components that RIM provides, in conjunction with the API documentation.

jQuery UI vs. Scriptaculous?

Which is better for UI development. Are there any differences between the two UI toolkits?
I currently use Prototype/Scriptaculous, but I'm looking to migrate to jQuery. My main reason is that the developers and community behind Prototype/Scriptaculous seem to have disappeared; there haven't been any new releases in a long time, and several features are still a little buggy. The jQuery & jQuery UI teams seem to be very engaged, more open (see this, for example), and have a larger and more active community.
jQuery is better,
it has noConflict method that allows you to easy migrate, having both prototype/scriptaculous and jquery library included
jQuery is light weight especially in compare with scriptaculous
jQuery produce very simple code that easy to test/review
jQuery support CSS 2/3 selectors even browser doesn't
For ROR there is a plugin jRails
Regards,
Pavel
JQuery will be supported in Visual Studio 2010 making it a good choice for .NET developers.
Check this link - jQuery and Microsoft
See comparison of features: http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/javascript-libraries
jQuery is very popular and well integrated in many frameworks, while the only framework in which scriptaculous is integrated is Ruby on Rails.
I just migrated all my client side scripting from Prototype / Scriptaculous to jQuery. The result is better performance (less coding + smaller footprint) and the application as a whole seems much richer. There is something really satisfying about jQuery development.
Prototype is a great library, but I got a little frustrated that, as DNS pointed out, the developers & community seem to have gone to sleep.
hmmm I find that scriptaculous is easier to use then JQ because it looks more like javascript and it has more core effects...I like that about it however yes it is a bit buggy and the comunity has started to move to JQuery...However I realy don't like JQ because it is like learning a new lanuage from scratch...it looks nothing like javascript
I've been using jQuery whenever I can. When using scriptaculous, I've found it hard to find suitable plugins that just work. Most of them have bugs or lack good documentation. For example, I went through 3 slideshows including writing my own in Scriptaculous before settling in and modifying one to suit my needs. With jQuery, I just had to go through 1 slideshow plugin because there are so many of them that one was bound to suit my needs.

Resources