UI widget development framework

I am going to redesign a website which is built using spring web MVC and javascript. Its a very simple website with limited features. But, I see that in near future, this site will need lot of UI widget/artifacts to be put in. Like a twitter feed, image galary, deal of the day etc etc.. In that case looking at the future development, I would like to use some sort of a declarative UI module/widget design framework which will ease out the development of the future widgets. Which framework should I adopt which will help me to do this? Ideally I am thinking - developers should be able to write a simple config file (like xml) which will have the HTML elements, CSS properties and action handlers 开发者_运维问答(javascripts which will get fired) and can enable that widget using some Drools rule or in an if loop of some sort.

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This is an older tutorial but I still think is a great example at showing some of the basics

Demo: http://nettuts.s3.amazonaws.com/127_iNETTUTS/demo/index.html

Tutorial: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/inettuts-with-cookies/

Shows what you can do with a bit of JavaScript and ease of jquery.

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You might want to look into using something like the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), you use Java code to write components which include HTML, CSS, and event handlers. You could use that as a basis for writing an XML schema and translate the XML elements into Java objects.