Questions about choice

Hi, I am an IT architect and now I am finding a new solution for our Web ERP systems.

As a matter of fact, we have used
Echo 2
as a presentation layer solution for 3 years. It works fine until last year - we need to integrate other in-house apps. it was so hard to create proper web components and our new CIO did not really satisfy the look-and-feel.

What we need now are
1.A new solution which provided rich functionality web components.
2.better with solid and flex customization
3.better has nice look and feel
4.better support popular browsers (ie 7+, fx 4+)

Here comes the question,

  1. our developers had happy experiences with
    Echo’s architecture
    . Is
    Vaddin’s architecture
    more fit to Web ERP ?
  2. has anyone heard
    zk
    before ? their
    architecture
    looks odd but seems performs good.
    3.some similar solutions like
    OpenFaces
    and
    Trinidad
    looks nice but they’re JSF based, does anyone have some experience with them ?

Cherise

I don’t really have experience with the other framework, so I’ll just give my own opinion on Vaadin and point you to some other resources.

With Vaadin you get some nice benefits. Everything is written in Java and all the code you’ll be writing is executed on the server side*. This means that you can write cross-browser compatible rich internet applications without having to master all the different web technologies (HTML, JavaScript - CSS skills are needed with Vaadin if you change the look and feel of the application), this is something that you usually see as increased productivity. Another benefit is security - all the logic and the state of the UI is preserved on the server side, hence you cannot accidentally expose business logic to the client side thus exposing your application for client side state attacks. One of the most common doubts about the server side architecture is scalability, for that, please
see this blog post
.

  • Except if you write custom client side widgets, which still are written in Java, but the code will be compiled into JavaScript using GWT and thus the code will be executed on the client side.

Now, if you are interested to see what kind of applications have been written with Vaadin, please take a look at the
who is using Vaadin
page. Actually, there exists
an ERP that is written with Vaadin
, so you wouldn’t be the first to write such an application.

  • Kim