I have been using a custom grown grid bag layout in my code. I often use them quite nested and our UI can get extremely complex (our UI designers for our company develop thick client style UIs for use in the browser -- fun for us).
All has been working quite well (with quite a lot of JS coding), except for performance. I have some pages with many layouts, many popup dialogs with complex custom controls (like color pickers, number formatters, CSS style formatters, etc.). These pages can take up to 7 seconds in IE6 to render (no load, actually 7 seconds of JavaScript CPU usage in the browser before the page is laid out). I can fix these things, but maintaining all this JavaScript UI code is taking me away from implementing our business functionality. There seem to be a lot of JS libraries out there, but some don't seem very compatible for JSF and many don't seem to have any complex layout support. I do need the ability to size the client according to the size of the browser (100% height and width) and the ability to dock to certain sides (top, left & bottom). Although a grid bag layout would be ideal, a border layout may work. The only one I found that seemed really good was GWT, but that would be a huge conversion to use (Switch from AjaxAnywhere to Ajax4Jsf and use G4jsf instead of facelets to build the UI and switch from Seam remoting to GWT RPC). Does anyone know of some good JavaScript libraries that have advanced layout capabilities that work well inside of JSF? Thanks, Andrew
