Suggestion for RIA

[bosnic]

Hi guys,
we are about to start a new project here in company where I am working as software architect/developer. I am new here and I am changing things a litle bit. In our new project we are going to use Spring framework for allmost everytinhg: MVC, transaction managment and all other stuff that Spring does. I would like a suggestion about what to use to make our web presentation more proffesional and usable. I am looking for something like Rich Faces, but I don't want to use JSF. I want some library/framework capable of rendering nice UI, with litle code, just as Rich Faces, using tags in first place. Do you have any suggetions?
P.S.
I allready looked for GWT integration with Spring. Do you recomend that? I would prefere to work only with a tag library, without writing UI code. I don't need AJAX features like assynchronus comunication, just a nice UI with some basics capabilities, like data grids that I can sort, menus that work and look nice, etc.
Thanks

[bosnic]

No suggestion?

[sgowtham]

You said everything from spring like MVC, etc.. then y u r searching.. Spring is having good Presentation tier.. then why you are searching new framework?

[bosnic]

I think I was clear. I will use Spring MVC, but I need some libraries to make my UI more pleasant. Or Spring can render something like this, using only taglib?

http://livedemo.exadel.com/richfaces-demo/index.jsp

http://www.exttld.com/

[pmularien]

There's not really anything in Spring MVC (if that's what you're using for your web tier) to prevent you from using any of the excellent Javascript UI libraries out there. Obviously you can only use RichFaces if you are integrating Spring with JSF (which is possible, although not using Spring MVC).

Why don't you want to use JSF? Why have you chosen to use Spring MVC?

[bosnic]

Well, there are some reasons for using Spring MVC in our team:
* Guys in my team come from Struts 1 development, so using Spring MVC is more natural to them and they are learning very fast.
* I love the concept of 'action' based framework, not really big fan of 'event' based frameworks like JSF. I allready did some stuff with JSF and I found Spring MVC easier and more productive.
* I think the performance is better when integrating Spring middle tier with its own MVC framework then with other Frameworks, besides you have more things to take care of (more jars to manage, update, test, integrate and so on).
* JSF is 'official' java web framework, and we know how things can be slow when it comes up to changes and new features (see how long it tooks to EJB2 become EJB3. EJB2 really sucks). On the other side, Spring has its own development cycle which is, in my opinion, faster, stable and enterprise ready.

I found a project that brings a full taglib support to work with extjs. We are doing some prototypes and getting really good results. Our interface is rendered by those tags, but MVC implementation is on Spring. It is just what we were looking for. And perhaps it is the only thing that Spring doesn't have by default, but who knows, maybe they come up with something like that in future. I hope they do.