Overview

This documentation is for an older version of ZK. For the latest one, please click here.

By default, code in zscript is Java language. Therefore, any code written in zscript can move to java file by slightly modification. In retrospect, any code written in java file can move to zscript by slightly modification. After all, they are all java.

It is convenient to use zscript in ZUML. The advantage is that no compilation is required and you can modify its content dynamically (without re-deploying the Web application). And the syntax is more intuitive, EL can access variables in zscript easily.

But it comes with a price: slower performance. The degradation varies from one application from another. For large website, it is suggested not to use zscript if possible. Also, you CAN NOT use Java debug tool to debug zscript, you can't set breakpoints in zscript. Not like Java, sometimes obvious bug like typo can't be easily found in zscript. ZK has implemented GenericAutowireComposer, it eases the burden of moving code from zscript to java a lot. Please refer to the smalltalk ZK MVC Made Easy for detail.

zscript is useful for prototyping, but it's more hard to debug and maintain. In the following paragraph, we'll show examples of equivalent zscript and java code.