Figure 17-17. JSR-303 validation error messages (i18n)
Now the views are basically complete, except the delete action. We will leave that one to you as an
exercise. Next, we will start to give our application more richness.
Using jQuery and jQuery UI
Although the views for our contact application work well, the user interface is quite raw. For example, for
the birth date field, it would be much better if we could add a date picker when the user enters the birth
date of the contact, instead of inputting the date string manually.
To provide a richer interface to the users of a web application, unless you are using rich Internet
application (RIA) technologies that require special runtimes on the web browser client (for example,
Adobe Flex requires Flash, JavaFX requires JRE, Microsoft Silverlight requires Silverlight, and so on), you
need to use JavaScript to implement the features.
However, developing web frontends with raw JavaScript is not easy. The syntax is very different
from Java, and you also need to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues. As a result, a lot of open
source JavaScript libraries are available that can make the process easier, such as jQuery, Dojo Toolkit,
and so on.
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