I want to start a project and I am evaluating the architecture.
And now I am at point to decide the front end components.
I want to use HTML5 + Css3 + Javascript
On Javascript side I don't know what do you recommend. YUI or Backbone. I don't know how to evaluate what can be the best for me. The idea is to create a Browser web app and a Mobile app.
Do you recommend another framework for do that? Or some book, url or something that expose how to organize my front end?
This might be a bit late. But I will say this. I've looked through these so far:
Angular, Knockout, Backbone, YUI
And I read some other comments on Ember.
From what I've seen, Angular and Knockout take the same starting approach. They start out telling you how to interface with the front end. I do NOT like this. They give you a whole lot of rope to hang yourself with if you don't know how to design good architecture. Its completely up to you to build a proper MVC app with them.
From what I've seen of YUI, its EXTREMELY similar to Backbone, which is no surprise because YUI was INSPIRED by Backbone. I have spent a LOT of time looking at backbone and I'm very impressed with it. If you follow its principles and standards, it will encourage you to build a sound framework that won't leave you hanging later.
But I saw another commentor who actually actually moved from Backbone to YUI because he said YUI is more streamlined and all around better. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true. But I need to evaluate it further.
Many folks, including myself, agree that Ember, Knockback, and Angular are rather "heavy handed" in their approach. Like I said, they START with explaining how to interface with the HTML. Right out of the gate, they're wanting you to do things a certain way. This could be very problematic depending on your particular application.. OR it could make your particular application a piece of cake if it fits nicely in their approach!
My two cents!
Backbone is great for creating web apps, both for desktop and mobile. It's strongest point is that it's small and quite simple: you can actually read through the entire annotated source code. Backbone helps you structure your code in a maintainable way, which is the main benefit.
The downside of backbone is that it's not very beginner-friendly: setting up the collections, models and views can be quite challenging if you're not used to it. It also doesn't help you at all in rendering the views, which is a blessing and a curse: it's not as easy or helpful as a widget based framework, but it also doesn't get in your way, which is especially important when implementing the mobile app.
I would recommend you study the backbone todo-example ( http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/#examples-todos ) to get an idea how the framework works.
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.
I've pretty much set my mind on using CreateJS to create an HTML5 game, but I also came across H5CGB, a boilerplate created specifically for creating HTML5 canvas games. It looks very thorough and I believe the developer when he says it would save me heaps of time writing code I would have had to write anyway.
However, looking at tutorials for both CreateJS and H5CGB, they seem to conflict quite a bit, at least in terms of how these specific tutorials implement their respective tools:
http://hub.tutsplus.com/tutorials/learn-createjs-by-building-an-html5-pong-game--active-11845
http://icecreamyou.github.io/HTML5-Canvas-Game-Boilerplate/docs/#!/guide/walkthrough
I'm basically just trying to understand how to integrate these two systems. For example, both come with their own preloader utility, so I'm not sure which to use and if they would cause issues or if it's just a redundancy resulting in unnecessarily longer loading times.
Has anyone had any experience working with these two tools together?
I believe you should probably just stick to using createJS because the two frameworks do have a lot of overlapping functionality. It wouldn't make sense to use both.
I think you should also check out other game specific frameworks like Crafty.js and possibly watch Google I/O Canvas to get a good idea on the total range of your options!
Crafty
http://craftyjs.com/
Google I/O
http://blog.sethladd.com/2011/05/source-code-slides-and-video-for-html5.html
Hope this helps and good luck learning canvas!
Shalom
I created H5CGB. (Just found this question today via the newly-released Github traffic stats.)
The biggest two reasons to use H5CGB are:
You do not have to learn any new APIs to start developing. H5CGB provides a bunch of scaffolding you can use to skip the boring stuff, but you won't get into trouble if you want to implement any part of your app yourself, and you probably can get going immediately just by editing main.js without even reading the documentation.
The code base is intended to be boilerplate, so you can use all the utilities and scaffolding H5CGB provides as a starting point and edit it if you want things to work differently.
This is in contrast to most other canvas libraries, which tend to be monolithic black boxes of no-touchiness with sparsely documented APIs.
I am having an absolute nightmare trying to build anything of value with Sencha Touch. The docs seem to describe everything in bits in pieces without every tying everything together..
One of my key gripes is that I don't understand how anything is loaded into the browser.. If I simply define an Ext.List in index.js within this method:
Ext.setup({
onReady: function() {
}
})
Then that Ext.List is loaded into the browser for some reason. If I define multiple objects in that method, how does it know which to put into the browser? Furthermore, when I extend Ext.List and put that in the above method, nothing happens. What's going on?
Better yet, where I can find good documentation that explains how this framework works? I've pored over everything on the Sencha Touch site, including the tutorials, and all of it is horribly incomplete.
It does seem confusing at first. What's important to understand is that Sencha Touch different from jQTouch or jQuery Mobile in that you create your interface in a completely programmatic way, os there's no defining the UI in a HTML file or anything like it. The framework is written much more in the tradition of classic widget set's, QT for example. This style isn't something traditional web developers are used to, but I'd actually say the documentation is quite complete. It's just not written in a style familiar to web developers.
This is how it works: one component needs to have an attribute fullscreen: true set on it. This component becomes the root, and all other visible UI components are added to this component using the .add() method. But there all defined in Javascript. That's the most crucial thing to remember.
You have probably already found it, but the main documentation repository is the API documentation (here). If you're going to get anywhere you will have to get used to reading stuff from here quite a lot. Important facts here is that everything in the UI inherits from the Component class, and that Panel is probably
When I was getting started, I found this page a little bit better for starting. I especially recommend Drew Neil's excellent screen casts on panels.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that Sencha Touch is still a young library, and that it has it's roots in the highly programmatic and OO-centric Ext.js framework. Taking some time to really learn the fundamentals of Ext.js probably helps a lot in the long run when trying to get going with Sencha Touch (tip: Observable is the most important class).
So sorry, you're right that the documentation isn't very friendly. But the UI you get from Sencha Touch still blows the competition out of the water when it comes to mobile interfaces, so I'd say that it's still worth it if you're really want the most slick mobile UI there is.
I recommend you to checkout the conference videos http://www.sencha.com/conference/videos specially the "Structuring Your Sencha Touch Application", I restarted an app from scratch following the MVC pattern explained in the video, in two days I got where I was before plus a ton of fixed bugs but most importantly now I really understand what I'm doing and why it was so hard to get things to work before using this standard pattern.
I found one of the best places to learn sencha touch is this 4 part series on building a simple SenchaTouch1.0 app :-
http://miamicoder.com/2011/writing-a-sencha-touch-application-part-1/
Follow it up with the MVC example :
http://miamicoder.com/2011/writing-a-sencha-touch-mvc-application/
Having completed the above tutorials gives you the comfort and confidence to approach SenchaTouch's own documentation, tutorials and screencasts.
I plan to start web app development. (Html, Css and Php) I want to make a mafia wars style game for the web. Static graphics game is played using buttons.
Its would really just be a database to store stats and a bunch of buttons.
Would this be too hard for a complete beginner to web development to take on? Would javascript even be necessary for this?
Yes. It would be too hard for a COMPLETE beginner to take on. Where complete beginner = just learning to program. If you have some other background (General CS knowledge, Database experience) then you could probably do it.
JavaScript doesn't sound necessary for what you are describing.
I would suggest going through a couple tutorials on web application development so that you understand the basic concepts, and then decide whether you know enough to start building your game app. Here are a couple tutorials for various development environments:
http://webproject.scottgu.com/CSharp/HelloWorld/HelloWorld.aspx
http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/community/tutorials/BuildJ2EEWebApp/BuildJ2EEWebApp.html
http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javaee/1.4/tutorial/doc/WebApp.html
You should probably at least read through some of those to get an idea of what you should know.
Would this be too hard for a complete
beginner to take on?
I don't think so. The game hasn't been developed by a single developer, there is a team of developers behind it. That shouldn't be an issue anyway, however, it won't be that easy for a beginner to take on such website initially unless you have good understanding of various concepts including strong knowledge of the main language, javascript, html, etc.
Would java script even be necessary
for this?
Possibly. Facebook has its own implementation of javascript named FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), it is more or less similar to vanilla javascript. At some stage or the other, javascript is needed to build some dynamic pages and there are certain facebook-related stuff you will need to use javascript (FBJS) for.
JavaScript. Yes. However, it can be done without but it may hurt the game in the long run.
A project for a beginning? It depends how focus the programmer is. If you are using this project to learn, certainly a good place to start. However, if it is for long run serious project, I would reconsider after learning some of the basic of programming.
If you love the idea you have and want to run with it, you will learn a ton in the process. Just don't expect to have a working product in a week. Don't let feature-creep hit too hard either. Odds are you'll end up re-writing it once you have an idea of how the process goes over all. I did something similar a few years back over the course of a month and I was pretty pleased with everything I learned.
You can do it, with patience.
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.