I plan on making an advance form system cms for company use. The options I found are WPF, winforms or to render it in HTML on an offline application.
I have varying level of experience with the first 2 but the third one I never came across until recently while researching this topic but (unless I'm poorly searching for it) I can not seem to find much info for it. I also need this system to dynamically create each form via code.
My question is for my situation, which would you choose and also explain a little more about HTML rendering method and how to create this type of system.
We aren't building your system so can't advise what you should do
Winforms
Pros
Classic structure so easy to pick up if you are familiar with classic desktop development
Cons
Rigid structure controls functions and appearance are closely coupled meaning doing anything none standard is difficult
WPF
Pros
Loosely Coupled function and appearance, this means that you can customise pretty much every element of the controls similar to CSS
High automation level, binding is built in as a fundamental function
Cons
very different to Classic structure as MVVM style is almost required, trying to do anything with out it is a very bad idea, meaning it can be hard to pick up
HTML
Pro
Easy to build for anyone familiar with Web development
Con
HTML is designed to be used online this means that any offline html system will require you to reinvent the wheel to circumvent the normal online behaviour (if you go down this route I would highly suggest an online intranet site rather than a offline system)
Related
Context: Ok so I am building a website for a friend. Hes a designer with a high need to daily include his projects (images and text).
Problem:
Ok so I know pretty much how to code in html/css/javascript a front end responsive website, that is the easy part for me, the hard one is the content page. I've never done it so I don't know the best way.
A page that he goes daily put a new project, new images, formatted text (A like a blog). But since he doesn't know anything about coding and front end, it has to be simple enough for him to understand.
Resources: I made several searches and found some websites that allow custom templates with content, one of them standing is wordPress (haven't used it for years). I am currently abusing tumblr for that matter, but their support is quite bad. Should I use one, should I buy a host like bluehost and create my self one, what you guys recommend? I tried google it but perhaps I am not doing it the right way since I am not finding any answer to my problem.
Look, you've come to a programming website, so the most common suggestion you'll get here, and the option I myself recommend is:
MAKE IT YOURSELF!
It really is a fun and very educational experience.
There are many, many ways to do this. In general you'll want to have a front end that communicates with a back end API.
For the front end, there are a lot of options. From templating engines like Jekyll, to MVC frameworks like Laravel, to full fledged high level abstractions like Angular and React, which are admitedly harder to learn but so, so robust, and useful once you've figured them out.
The selection of tools you can use to make the API that supports the website is just as rich. There is ASP.NET for C# (which some people use for the front end as well but I wouldn't), there is Node.JS for JavaScript, with a myriad of libraries and packages to get you started. Flask is a popular option for Python. The list goes on and on.
Oh and dont forget about Ruby on Rails.
As for the interface which your friend will use to add their work, turning all that complicated back end into a simple, easy to use interface is a fundamental part of UX design and, IMHO, quite satisfying once you get it right. Make it sleek and, most of all, intuitive. One shouldn't have to be taught how to use it. It should be apparent from the first time they open the page. You should always ask for their feedback as you are developing it. Some even opt to create mock ups of the interface, in order to get feedback on both its aesthetics and its intuitiveness before a single line of code has been written.
Now, regarding how you'll actually do it, the answer really depends on the tools you opt to use. In general, you'll want to read up on things like the MVC pattern, or React's component architecture. The former is something you'll come across on a wide variety of platforms. The latter is mostly React specific, but in my opinion, understanding how to properly build a website using component architecture means you're in the right mindset, something that will help you no matter how you choose to build it.
All that being said...
Web development is complicated. Creating dynamic websites is a much larger undertaking that designing a static page, or even making an SPA. Though I do wholeheartedly recommend you do it at some point, starting with your friend's website might not be the best idea. Or, you may simply not have the time to sift through all your options, figure out which is best for you, begin the learning process etc.
In that case, there are plenty of publishing frameworks and tool sets to choose from. Wordpress has become very popular in the recent years, and templates and plugins for it are abundant. Alternatives like Medium and Ghost have also gained some traction.
There are plenty of commercial CMS type frameworks. One I have heard good things about is ExpressionEngine. However, I cannot speak for it with certainty.
If you are looking for a website builder, there are also plenty of options out there such as Weebly, Wix, as well as Squarespace. Google sites is a relative newcomer in that department, but seems promising.
So, in summary,
I wholeheartedly recommend building it from scratch. There are many, many languages, frameworks, and tools out there you can choose from, each with its own patterns, best practices and idiosyncrasies. If you lack the time, or simply don't feel like going through that process of building a dynamic website from scratch, you can use one of many tools available. However, that wouldn't be nearly as much fun, and would likely produce an inferior result.
The server side is pretty much set up, it's basically
struts 2 / spring security / jpa.
Now I have to decide what to do with the client side (the browser). The client side codebase should be maintainable and should lend itself to automatic regression testing.
So as an example lets say I need a table component having properties such as
sortable/pageable columns
reordering of rows and columns (via drag & drop)
inline editing of table cells
remembers state when customer re-visits page
integrates easily with struts 2
As far as I understand things there're 4 alternatives
DIY using oldschool HTML + JQuery + Ajax
Finding a JQuery plugin that does all this or
plumb together different plug-ins (like Flexigrid + additional plug-in for drag & drop)
Using a JS toolkit
Should I stick with JQuery? Or should I go for fullblown JS toolkits? I have little experience with JQuery and JS toolkits (I'm not a web developer).
Thank you for helping a serverside programmer cross the messy world of web-ui-programmming ;)
My experience is that Dojo's support for programming-in-the-large is great if you have a large-scale app that will benefit from the build system, class system, widgeting system and integrated widgeting library. It also of course brings all the standard stuff with it, like cross-browser support and event system.
If you just need some widgets and animations then any library will work. I'd stick with the one you/your team knows best. jQuery definitely has the greatest number of people with that skillset.
Our team wasted 6 months trying to give the client what they wanted with JQuery/UI, and we switched to ExtJS 4, and the client is happy after 2 months. This is an app with 50+ models.
JQuery/UI is NOT designed for web applications. It is designed for web SITES. Sure, it has some good plugins, but you'll spend countless hours learning their apis and switching your thought process between them all. JQuery/UI lacks the following:
a graphical designer (see Sencha Designer 2), ie graphical layout GUI program
complicated layouts (in ext you can switch a layout of a container to accordion, tabs, wizard, anchors with one setting)
a grid (ext grid supports paging, sorting, filtering, grouping, summaries, editing out of the box)
real comboboxes
a model view controller system
templating
good html editor control
a whole ton of other stuff
do yourself a favour and spend the money on ext, and save yourself countless hours.
regarding the grid you mentioned, ext's is far superior to anyone else's. you can do what you listed in about 20 nicely-formatted lines. i am not kidding.
regarding client-side unit testing, use jasmine with ext.
The short answer is yes. Frameworks like Ext.js take care of a whole lot code that you would end up writing yourself if you were to write everything from scratch. These frameworks take care of models, events, views, communication with servers/APIs, etc.
This isn't really an answerable question. It all depends.
ExtJS is great for very specific things. If you want those very specific things, it's likely the most efficient option for you.
If jQuery UI meets your needs, then that's your answer.
If you have jQuery dev's, maybe stick with jQuery.
If you have ExtJS folks, consider ExtJS
etc, etc.
Can anyone point me to a useful guide for UI designers working in google web toolkit?
As per my comment to bhargava's answer, your designers should be learning UiBinder. The whole chapter about building user interfaces seems appropriate too (to get a better perspective), but UiBinder is what they will be mostly dealing with. Without using UiBinder in your project, you are stuck with Java and that's not something your designers are likely to know (and are probably not keen to :)).
I'd recommend building a simple example (but not too simple - maybe you should "strip" the official mail example) that uses UiBinder and show the designers exactly what you expect them to provide and what should be left as stubs. It all depends on the designers in question - whether all they know is HTML and CSS or maybe they have experience with Java, etc. Tailor the example to your needs - you probably won't "get it right" the first time, but with feedback from the designers (what's hard to understand, what they think should be the responsibility of the programmer, etc.), you should arrive at a good learning tool for future employees and a reference for current ones :)
Well if you're looking on how to use widgets and panels in gwt then i would recommend Roughian Examples
This website provides us the basic usage of the GWT widgets and panels and provides us with enough information just to get things started.
im using mvc framework and i have learned some techniques that help me with different parts of RAD.
models: doctrine/visual paradigm
controllers/libraries: various design patterns
now i only need to know what technique/solution i should use for the views so that i can create views more rapidly.
cause i don't think it's efficient to code css/html manually, even though i understand it. its the same principle when using visual paradigm to create both my mysql database tables and doctrine model classes. i believe in using right tools will boost up development speed.
so what could i use for the views to save time and energy so i don't reinvent the wheel all the time and can focus on the business logic rather than html/css for everything? of course i would have to step in and fine tune with it when needed.
dreamweaver?
any css generation tools?
960/blueprint for layout?
suggestions?
thanks
I've made a previous answer about developing websites without using HTML or CSS, there might be something relevant. The solutions in that answer are mostly related to "desktop class webapps", i.e. applications not websites.
Apart from that I will say that blueprint and 960gs are both very good solutions for doing normal website applications (webapps?). Things like grids etc. are extremely helpful and will speed up the development. You still have to use HTML and CSS.
I wouldn't recommend Dreamweaver, I have never used it, but I believe that you would still have to edit in the bits and pieces to insert the content, so it probably won't be a good solution in the long run.
I'm a .NET guy desktop developer, and I love that. I don't really love web development because we lost precious time to debug CSS, javascript, and compatibility stuff instead of creating value.
But I think it's because I had not taken time to learn about good web development practices, so now because I want to become the best developer that I can, I'd like to learn about my weakness.
Can you give me some advices/links/patterns/frameworks to become a good web developer ? (I am a .NET guy so I accept everything that will permit me to develop better websites in .NET).
Thanks !
Precision
I have done a lot of ASP.NET webform in the past, but this is not enough to create great web site without loosing time on compatibility/css/javascript issue.
You could take a shortcut and use ASP.NET, which provides a number of controls to make web development easier - and you'll be familiar using them.
Unfortunately, they aren't really that great (imo) and do not teach you good practices with the web.
I suggest you look into ASP MVC, which is now in beta. This will teach you how to write websites whilst allowing you to use libraries you are familiar with .NET
With general web development, look into websites like W3schools which will teach you the basics.
Remember to seperate presentation from markup with CSS and make sure you are using javascript to add value to a page, but make sure your page is still usable without it.
You will always lose time with CSS compatability issues, all I can say is with practice you learn what pitfalls to avoid so it gets a little easier.
As for javascript development, it has improved considerably in the past few years with frameworks which in theory are cross-browser. Maybe try looking into JQuery which syncs well with ASP MVC and has intellisense in visual studio
Advices:
Best advice I can give to you: Just don`t get angry when you done something correct but it wont show as you wanted. Patience! :)
Links:
www.w3schools.com
Nettuts.com
Webappers.com
Digital Point - webmasters forum
Patterns:
My advice is to get more into MVC pattern and any enterprise pattern.
Frameworks:
Just see this link :) Framework Guide
For Javascript: JQuery,Prototype,Mootools,EXTJs
For CSS: 960 grid system is pretty good
Make sure you learn about the client/browser side as well.
Current best practice with all the different browsers around is to use a javascript library to make your web-application cross platform and cross-browser. An AJAX library like jQuery or Prototype to perform the interactive actions you wouldn't be able to do with standard HTML and CSS in the pre-AJAX era.