Comparing Presentation Technologies

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Submitted to the Sixth Sakai Conference to be held Dec. 2006 in Atlanta, GA.

This work was researched and presented jointly by Mark Norton and Aaron Zeckoski.

1. Introduction

Very early on in the Sakai project, JavaServer Faces was chosen as the defacto presentation technology to be used. In some ways, that decision was somewhat premature. JSF wasn't (and isn't) a mature presentation approach. It has bugs and short comings. The Sun reference implementation has lagged behind others, especially myFaces.

These pages are intended to be an exploration of how these various presentation technologies can be used in Sakai, to explore their relative merits and to document their short comings.

Each of these technologies will be rated using the following categories:

  • Easy for Designer - How easy is it for UI designers to work with this technology (templates, etc.)?
  • Easy for Developer - How easy is it for the developer to work with this technology?
  • Separation of Code and UI - Can code and representation be separated?
  • Integration with Sakai - Is this technology integrated with Sakai at this time?
  • Expressibility - Can all important web interactions be expressed using this technology?
  • Maturity - How large of a community is using this and for how long?

The following scale will be used to rate these categories:
(tick) - Meets or exceeds Sakai's needs.
(info) - Intermedia support.
(error) - Fails or partially meet's Sakai's needs.

2. Sakai Supported Presentation Technologies

With the release of Sakai 2.0, presentation styles have been opened up to include other approaches. Full support in Sakai means dispatching correctly to Sakai tool placements, handling events according to Sakai guidelines, and supporting the Sakai GUI elements. The follow technologies are supported either currently or near term:

3. Other Technologies Currently in Use

People have found ways to build Sakai tools using:

4. Other Java Presentaton Technologies

Other technologies which might be considered include:

5. Other User Interface Techniques

6. Methodology

Information about these technologies was collected from a variety of sources. References to internet-accessible sources are included in the sub-pages here. Several people were consulted concerning their opinion of these technologies. These people include:

  • Antranig Basman (RSF, JSF)

Finally, example software was implemented in Servlet, JSP, JSF, and RSF.

7. References and Notes

Collected References and Notes document the sources of information for this paper and provide substantial more detail.