For a UI, we have a number of options. We've already looked at JavaFX and the NetBeans RCP in this book. While those are great options, we'll do something a little different for this app and build a web-based interface. Even here, we have many, many options: JSF, Spring MVC, Google Web Toolkit, Vaadin, and more. Oftentimes, in real-world applications, while we may have a Java backend, we may have a JavaScript frontend, so that's what we'll do here, and that's where your choices can get really dizzying.
The two biggest players in that market at the time of the writing of this book are React from Facebook and Angular from Google. There are several smaller contenders, such as React API-compatible Preact, VueJS, Backbone, ...
