RUI (Rich User Interface): The buzz..and The Players!!

User Interface ‘has been’, ‘is’ and ‘will be’ one of the most important aspects of web application development. Now a day, for mobile app development as well. Also, it is one of most important criteria for ‘user/business acceptance’ as well as ‘end user delight’.

Well..a lot of pleasant sounding terms above, but, how do we accomplish this? The answer is RUI…or Rich User Interface.

Enterprises have been spending a lot in developing their own standards and APIs for RUI. However, underneath this, it’s the blend of CSS and some Java Script API.

Some of the popular RUI frameworks available in market are ExtJS, Jquery, Prototype, Flex, YUI and Dojo. Each of them has its own pros and cons. Hence, it’s important to evaluate and decide on one of them before you go ahead with actual development, as per your need. Also, keep in mind the learning curve involved with each of them.

  

One of my favourites is ExtJs. So, following this post, I am going to write more about ExtJS. For now, introducing ExtJS. Here it goes:

ExtJS (pronounced as E-X-T-J-S) is a Rich User Interface framework, provided by Sencha (http://www.sencha.com). And, this is one of most used UI frameworks in the market today.

Interestingly, it comes with both open source as well as commercial license.

It has many rich look components, which are quite extensible. And, plenty of powerful features such as AJAX, DOM Manipulation, Communication Support for REST, Good looking Charts (rendered using SVG).

Object Oriented (Class based) approach allows you to make your own custom component by extending existing components. Further, MVC based approach allows you to make your UI layer modular and extremely maintainable. What’s more? You are bound to get rid of your FAT ugly looking JSPs (or server side scripts).

Further details can be found at http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/

Watch this space, for more on ExtJS. J