Knockout4Java

From APIDesign

Revision as of 07:58, 19 June 2014

Knockout4Java is one of the subprojects of DukeScript. It builds on Knockout.js, which is a powerful and attractive JavaScript library. It is lightweight and does its job (e.g. binding between a model and an HTML page) so well, that I decided to use it in my Bck2Brwsr and FXBrwsr projects and bind it together with JSON4Brwsr APIs.

Knockout for Java

Are you coming from a Java camp, yet interested in rendering via HTML? Well, then you are just three steps (in case you have Maven and JDK7 installed) away from reaching a nirvana. Just type:

$ mvn archetype:generate \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apidesign.html \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=knockout4j-archetype \
  -DarchetypeVersion=0.7.5

Answer few questions (for example choose myfirstbrwsrpage as artifactId) and then you can:

$ cd myfirstbrwsrpage
$ mvn process-classes exec:java

In a few seconds (or minutes if Maven decides to download the whole Internet of dependencies) you should see a sample Hello World application. It is basically composed from one Java and one HTML file:

$ ls src/main/java/**/DataModel.java
$ ls src/main/webapp/pages/index.html

Play with them, modify them. Of course, if you use any good IDE that speaks Maven (hint try NetBeans version 7.3 or higher). Your development comfort even increases. For example you'll be able to debug your Java code.

Contribute

The Knockout4Java is now a NetBeans project (see its wiki) and the main development repository is hosted at http://hg.netbeans.org/html4j/ The project is dual licensed under CDDL and GPLwithClassPathException (the same license as rest of NetBeans code), so it should be friendly enough to be used in your own applications.

Your contributions are more than welcomed. Let's make this project a base for modern user interface based on HTML for next version of NetBeans and other platforms that can render HTML!

Let me know what features you miss and what other you'd like to see in the FXBrwsr project.

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