Java Web Design Software

It’s been a while since we last wrote a blog, so we have a lot to catch you up on. Having just released Java Web Design Software Version 3.0, we have been very busy with new clients who have joined our family. We are very excited to welcome them aboard, and we thank all of our existing clients for their continued support and loyalty.

Java Web Design Software 3.0 is an even better system than its predecessors; it is faster, easier to use, and offers more options for your design needs. It also includes some of the most popular add-ons from previous versions. Let us quickly go over those add-ons for you, in case you are new to Java Web Design Software.

Java Web Design Software

1 GIMP (free and open source)

GIMP is a free and open source software that provides original artwork creation. The artists can have the power and flexibility to transform images into truly unique creations. This free website design tool can provide high-quality image manipulation. GIMP manages the tasks related to photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.

Graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, and other artistic people can create design elements, icons, and scripted images with the help of GIMP.

(Source: GIMP)

Core functionalities:

• Photo Manipulation
• The full suite of painting tools
• File Handling
• Animation
• Customizable Interface
• Photo Enhancement
• Digital Retouching
• Hardware Support 
• File Formats (JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF)
• Filtering
• Image Editor
• Templates
• Artwork Creation
• Graphic design elements
• Programming Algorithms
• Desktop publishing Workflow
• Extensibility and flexibility

2 Brackets (open source)

Brackets is an open source tool that can design in the browser effortlessly. Brackets software is crafted for web designers and front-end developers. You will find this open source website design tool light-in-weight yet compelling. 

The software helps in creating new pages or sites and provides a simple interface to web designers. With live preview functionality, the user can connect to the web browser in real-time. It is an excellent tool for coding exercises.

(Source: Brackets)

Core functionalities

• Inline Editors
• Live Preview
• Preprocessor Support
• Front-end editor
• Simple user interface
• Effortlessly switch between the tabs or pages
• Multiple Cursors
• Open Source Text Editor

3 openElement –free

openElement is free software for creative professionals. This powerful and intuitive web authoring program provides tools to build a reliable, compliant website. This software supports all the latest technology (like HTML5, CSS3).

This free web design tool can maximize productivity by simplifying tasks and optimizing workflow. This tool helps in providing efficiency in the web creating process. Custom elements can be effortlessly modified and created with openElement. OpenElement can optimize your site for a better user experience and a higher position in search results.

(Source: openElement)

Core Functionalities:

• Intuitive Interface
• Responsive design
• Drag-and-drop facility
• SEO Management
• Element Editor
• Image and Code optimization
• Easy integration of scripts
• Cross-browser
• Reusable styles and element packs 
• Manage Codes

4 Adobe Dreamweaver (open source)(free trial)

Adobe Dreamweaver is an open source software that is fast and responsive. The developers can create websites and web applications for any device with the help of this tool.

This tool is apt for everything from single page design to the development of dynamic pages. It is a powerful and fully-featured web designing software tool. The software can build beautiful sites for any browser or device. In a few easy steps, you can set up your website. The software can provide a dynamic display on every device. 

(Source: Adobe Dreamweaver)

Core Functionalities:

• Multi-device products
• Dynamic Code editor
• Regular Updates
• Quick Publishing
• Code Themes and Introspection
• Real-Time Browser Preview
• Syntax Checking
• Fast and flexible coding 
• Creative cloud
• Seamless live view editing
• Multi-monitor support

5 Mobirise (free)

Mobirise is free software that can efficiently create a mobile-friendly website. The software can create landing pages, online resumes, and portfolios effortlessly. Without HTML/CSS skills, the professionals can create a stunning site in a few minutes with the help of this free software.

This free web designing tool can effortlessly set up a stunning personal site or a fully functioning landing page for the business. The software is a downloadable offline web builder that can be supported on Win, Mac, and Android Operating systems. 

(Source: Mobirise)

Core Functionalities:

• Mobile-friendliness
• Latest website blocks and techniques
• Drag-and-drop website builder
• Website builder
• Themes and Templates
• Extensions
• Bootstrap and AMP (accelerated mobile page) pages

6 Webflow (free)

Webflow is free software that can translate the design into clean and semantic code, which can be quickly published to the web. The pre-built pieces can be used for complex elements like tabs, sliders, and background videos. The software can create reusable symbols and can effortlessly keep the items organized. 

It is easy to build the site with real content by employing this free website design software. The software can create responsive sites and can create reusable CSS classes. The user has complete control over the layout. The software allows the building of website interactions and animations visually. 

(Source: Webflow)

Core Functionalities:

• Build CSS (Cascading style sheets) grid-powered layouts visually
• Add CSS filters
• Clean, compliant, exportable client
• Responsive Images
• Flexible and responsive layouts
• Reusable and editable symbols
• Creative Control 
• Content Management System (CMS)
• Customizable forms
• Marketing & SEO
• Website animations and interactions visually
• Custom Branding
• Fine-tune typography
• Global color swatches
• Integrations
• Motion design

7 Webydo (free trial of 30 days)

Webydo is a cloud-based software that can create beautiful websites without handling any code. The software is apt for businesses and design agencies. With the help of intuitive tools, it is effortless to have an excellent website-building experience. 

The software is easy-to-use that allows for building responsive SEO-friendly websites along with a powerful content management facility. Users can efficiently create interactive and attractive sites.

(Source: Webydo)

Core Functionalities:

• SEO-friendly websites
• Content Management
• Client Billing
• White label branding
• Customizable Templates
• Hosting 
• Web Analytics
• Social Integration
• Mobile styling
• eCommerce
• Drag and drop elements
• Responsive websites
• Parallax Scrolling Animator
• Professional design tool

Although the list mentioned above of free and open-source web designing tools is of top-notch quality that can provide amazing results to the users. Along with it, there is also one more web design software- Google web designer, which is gaining popularity. Below you can explore the core functionalities of Google web designer:

java web framework

1. Spring

With its concept of Dependency Injection and aspect-oriented programming features, Spring took the development world by storm. It is an open-source framework used for Enterprise applications.

With Spring, developers can create loosely coupled modules where-in dependencies are handled by the framework rather than depending on the libraries in the code.

Spring framework is exhaustive and covers a lot of features including security and configuration, which are easy to learn. Further, since it is the most popular web framework, you can find a lot of documentation and an active community.

With everything configured, your code will be clean and easy to comprehend.https://657ebc162769531a3646875075bbdf9f.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Main concepts:

• Dependency Injection (DI) (Inversion of Control) – In this principle, rather than the application taking control of the flow sequentially, it gives the control to an external controller who drives the flow. The external controller is the events. When some event happens, the application flow continues. This gives flexibility to the application. In Spring, IoC is done by DI which are of three types – setter injection, method injection and constructor injection.
• Beans and Spring Context – In Spring, objects are called as beans and there is a BeanFactory that manages and configures these beans. You can think of the beanfactory as a container that instantiates, configures and manages the beans. Most applications use xml (beans.xml) for the configuration. ApplicationContext which a superset of BeanFactory is used for more complex applications that need event propagation, declarative mechanisms and integration with aspect-oriented features of Spring.
• Read about some more major spring concepts here.

2. Struts

Apache Struts is another robust open-source framework for web applications. It follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) model and extends the JSP API. In a traditional servlet-JSP approach, if a user submits let’s say a form with his details, the information then goes to a servlet for processing or the control goes over to next JSP (Java Server Pages – where you can write Java code in an HTML). This becomes confusing for complex applications as the ‘View’ or presentation layer should ideally not have business logic.

Struts separate the View, Controller and the Model (data) and provides the binding between each through a configuration file struts-config.xml.

The controller is an ActionServlet where you can write templates for the View and the user data is maintained using ActionForm JavaBean. The Action object is responsible for forwarding the application flow.

The View is maintained by a rich set of tag libraries.

Struts are easy to set up and provides much more flexibility and extensibility over the traditional MVC approach using servlets and JSP alone. It can be a good starting point for your career as a web developer.

3. Hibernate

Though Hibernate is not a full-stack framework, it completely changed the way we looked at the database. Implementation of Java Persistence API (JPA), Hibernate is an Object-Relational-Mapping (ORM) database for Java applications. Just like SQL, queries in Hibernate are called HQL (Hibernate Query Language).

Hibernate directly maps Java classes to corresponding database tables and vice versa.

The main file in hibernate is the hibernate.cfg.xml file that contains information about mapping Java classes with database configuration.

Hibernate solves the two major problems with JDBC – JDBC doesn’t support object-level relationship and if you ever decide to migrate to a different database, the older queries may not work – meaning a lot of changes – i.e. time and money!

Hibernate provides an abstraction layer so that the code is loosely coupled with the database. Stuff like establishing a database connection, performing CRUD operations are taken care of by Hibernate – so developers need not implement that, hence making the code independent of the database used.

Choose one or more from these beginner and advanced courses to get a complete overview of Hibernate and JPA.

4. Apache Wicket

If you have already worked with JSP, the learning wicket will be a cakewalk. A simple Java web frameworks, Wicket has a component-oriented structure and all you need to know is Java and HTML. Absolutely no XMLs or configuration files!

The main feature of Wicket is it POJO model wherein components are simple (Plain Old) Java Objects having OOP features. These components are bundled together as reusable packages with images, buttons, forms, links, pages, containers, behaviours and more so that developers can customize them.

Wicket is light-weight and you can build applications really fast. It is also easy to unit test code written in Wicket.

5. JSF (Java Server Faces)

Don’t confuse JSF with JSP, which is just a text document that can have static and dynamic content. JSF is developed by Oracle as a part of the Java Enterprise Edition 7.

It is a component-based MVC framework and has reusable UI components for server-based applications. The main idea is to encapsulate various client-side technologies like CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that will allow developers to create UI without knowing any of these technologies in-depth. They can just drag and drop UI components and focus more on their presentation layer specifics.

The default templating system in JSF is the FaceLets. JSF is quite similar to Struts.

JSF can be further seamlessly integrated with AJAX-enabled components to enrich the user experience by adding Ajax events for validations and method invocations.

Check out this LinkedIn course to know more about JSF.

6. Dropwizard

Another Java framework true to its name – wizard. This light-weight framework lets you complete your application very fast because of it’s out of the box support for advanced configurations, logging, application metrics and much more. You can create RESTful web applications that give high performance, are stable and reliable.

Dropwizard is especially magical because it brings together a host of libraries like Jetty, Guava, Jersey, Jackson, and Metrics amongst many others from the Java ecosystem into one framework and gives you a light-weight and lean application.

Since there are integrated libraries for all the configurations, security and performance-related tasks, all you need to do as a developer is building your business logic.

Dropwizard is an open-source framework that is bundled with libraries and you can easily set it up with Eclipse IDE and create a simple project to learn (Believe me, you can learn Dropwizard on your own!). The basic tutorial from Dropwizard website will help you through each step.

7. Grails

Grails is an easy to learn full-stack framework much suitable for those who are just beginning their programming career. While Grails is a web framework written in Groovy programming language, it runs on Java platform and is perfectly compatible with Java syntax. This framework is based on the MVC design pattern.

Groovy is similar to Java which some more features added when compared to Java. It is very easy to learn Groovy if you already know Java.

Similar to JSP, in Grails, the rendering technology is GSP (Groovy Server Pages). Creating tags for the View in Grails is simple and easy. It also uses GORM which as you might have guessed is the ORM implementation used in Grails. You can also directly use Hibernate instead of GORM. Grails has built-in support for RESTful APIs thus making it easy to create such services.

Here comes the best part – you can integrate your existing java code with Grails. If you have a mix of Groovy and Java code in your application – it will work just fine!

The best way to learn Grails is to set up your own development environment using any Java IDE like Eclipse, NetBeans etc… and follow any of these tutorials to build your first web application.

8. ATG

ATG is a web commerce platform written in Java. It is a customizable and configurable framework, particularly useful for websites related to e-commerce. The product is owned by Oracle and supports both B2B and B2C applications that are complex and huge. For small scale applications, it could be costly, however. If you are getting into developing e-commerce websites, ATG is a good framework to learn and will enrich your technical as well as domain knowledge.

ATG platform can run on three servers – Oracle Weblogic, IBM Websphere, and JBoss.

There are 3 main layers in the framework –

• The Dynamo Application Framework – it is the base layer that provides a development environment based on JavaBeans and JSP. There are standard ATG classes for all the common functionalities and even custom Java code can be created and assembled out of component beans by linking them through configuration files.
• The Personalization module – This is where the content for each user is customized dynamically. This module helps control and maintain user-profiles and business rules that define what content is to be shown to a particular user. This layer also supports targeted emails.
• The Scenarios module – This module further enhances the capabilities of the personalization module by introducing time-sensitive, event-driven campaigns that manage interactions between site visitors and the content for a period of time. For example, limited time offers, exclusive deals for certain members etc…

ATG is an extensive framework and you need time and patience to learn it. Several big companies like Walmart, Macy’s, BestBuy, ASDA and more have their website built on ATG.

9. Play

Play is a slightly conventional and unique type of framework that follows the approach of convention over configuration. It is based on the MVC pattern and is an open-source web application framework. Apart from Java, you can write Play web applications in Scala.

Play is similar to Django or Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET architecture and doesn’t necessarily follow J2EE web standards.

Some features of Play are –

• High performance because of the asynchronous processing
• No container, no states and built on reactive principles
• Uses statically-typed language, so most errors are caught during compile time saving a lot of mistakes early in the development life-cycle.
• Scala explores true OOP along with some functional programming concepts. Its compatibility with Java makes for an excellent and powerful system.
• With Play2, a new powerful build system sbt has been released which makes it easy to integrate with Maven projects as well as create simple JAR files.
• Extensive relational database access libraries for common functionalities are in-built.

10. Apache Hadoop

Though Apache Hadoop is not a full-stack framework, it provides a software framework and works on the MapReduce programming model. These utilities can easily handle huge volumes of data (Big Data), store, analyse and process them to provide faster and more efficient

I have included Hadoop in this list because it is the ‘thing’ of today with Big Data gaining prominence.

Hadoop helps in distributed data storage and processing using the master slave design pattern. The Hadoop HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) layer of the master node (namely NameNode) has the data node. The MapReduce layer has the JobTracker and the tasktracker. The slave nodes have the Data node and the taskTracker respectively.

HDFS divides the files into set of blocks and these are replicated across the cluster.

If you want to familiarize yourself with big data and data science – Hadoop is your place to start. Learn Hadoop easily through these tutorials.

Conclusion

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