I'm not a Web Developer, and I don't know a lot about the web application frameworks out there.
Recently, however, I got into Wt. It's a web framework written in C++ (that's why I got into it), but what impressed me the most is the idea it's based on.
Its API is different from any web framework I ever heard of (CppCMS, Yii, Django, Pylons, Zope, Drupals, Java Servlets, Struts ...): a new Application object gets created for any user session, and it stays alive until the session expires (only at this point the Application object gets destroied). This Application object works like a desktop window: you put Widgets in it (widgets like forms, links, labels ...); when the user clicks on a link (when the HTTP server receives a new GET/POST request) a function gets called on the object tight to the user session (in a nice Signal/Slot way), which can remove/add/change the widgets, thus changing the page the user will see.
As I said, I'm not very skilled with web frameworks, I develop almost only desktop applications; maybe for this reason I think this paradigm behind Wt is great.
I'd like to know what are the pros and cons of this framework API in respect to the other ones, and if there are other frameworks (also in other languages) based on the same concepts.
Wt is a great framework for its intended range of applications.
Wt is great for :
web apps tightly coupled to a session, i.e.
made to be accessed only by users that are logged in (except the landing page)
display a lot of user-dependent content (so not for a wiki)
relying heavily on state
web apps that need to have a lot of controls/buttons and user input.
For exemple, I plan to write a browser MMORPG. Pages will all be having a state tied to a user, and there will be a lot of buttons. Wt is perfect for that. I used to be a Ruby on Rails developper, and switching to Wt for this kind of app was a great moment. It's increadibly cumbersome to design forms with traditional frameworks that try to enforce pure REST.
Wt would also be perfect for a control interface on some process. For example, an interface allowing your customers to configure their adword campain, etc.
Of course, using Wt is not perfect regarding control and separation, but it allows extremely fast development when you need only the "classic" features (buttons, editors, etc.)
So as a rule of thumb, if you are trying to put a desktop application on the web (which is a great idea, removing the need to deploy and update on your customers' machines), Wt is a good candidate.
Also, if you are interfacing with an existing C++ codebase, Wt has an advantage.
I think this is generally bad idea.
Web application is very different from GUI one and there are many reasons:
99% of the web is about the content rather then about iteration.
You go to web to get or share content rather then to do some real time interaction
like drawing a picture, working with spreadsheet or anything else.
Web is content driven rather then "event driven" interactive application.
This has strong impact on how do you create most of web - you bring information
to user rather then interact with him.
The server and client programming is very different
There are some web GUI applications like e-Mail, Chats clients but to perform well
they require very good separation between the client side written
in high quality Java Script and the high quality server side backend that is used
over AJAX for content retrieval.
Hiding this separation like Wt does or (other known frameworks) lead to crappy
software and generally brings more problems then solutions in long run.
Because it should be very clear separation between server side and client side jobs
as some require real time response and some don't.
When you try to solve all this in one wait for problems. Note, there are client-server
solutions for GUI (see X-Server as example) but unlike web they designed for this
and rather work more like IPC rather then client-server solitions.
The web is stateless most of the time.
Or to be more correct the state usually keeps quite small amount of data.
Creation of instant session object is nice idea until you need to...
Scale up save state in long terms then this model becomes not so good, of course
this not "forced" model by Wt but it is general concept that fits certain concept
and some does not.
Bottom Line
If you want to design good GUI like web application. Start learning JavaScript and use good GUI JavaScript frameworks that fit well to GUI even driven design. Then combine them with some server side API using some interaction RPC model like Json-RPC, XML-RPC and other
AJAX tools.
This is the way to do things right for highly interactive applications.
If your application is more content oriented then most of server side web
frameworks do great job - concentrate on server side with its great tools suitable
for the job.
All in one solution? It just does not work...
Disclosure: I'm developer of CppCMS and I think Wt just goes in wrong way.
ASP.NET is similar; it has the same goal to make web development look like desktop application development.
Related
In my company we develop internal products and usually this products must be integrated (typical scenario). Our solution is always use SOA web services for this kind of task.
This is a solution that forces different products to develop same UI interfaces, and the responsibility of this interfaces or process is sometimes not clear between our teams.
I want to propose an alternative solution, I think that sometimes each product publish SOA web services but in addition publish web-pages, that other products can call to reuse.
for propose it in the work, I want document my-self because I suppose that this kind of integration is already invented, and have a name, examples, tools, best-practices...
any orientation?
To me it looks like a mistake to share entire UIs across applications. This will violate the separation of concerns principle, and will couple applications to each other. Also, you will end up losing autonomy because an external application will control how your UI looks. You will have all kinds of issues, related to the inter-dependencies between applications. These are the first that come to mind:
I assume the information is not public. If so, you'll need single sign-on between applications. In order to implement some level of security (at the very least authentication) you'll need to integrate all your applications within a single sign on-solution or invent some kind of convention for passing tokens between applications.
It will be very hard to implement even primitive authorization if needed, because naturally roles in different systems vary, especially across business domains.
If you have to filter any data by some property, it will have to be transferred in the request to the central application that holds the GUI prior to displaying. The whole processing of data and preparation for visualization will then be responsibility of this central UI system. This will lead to insane amount of caller-specific rules for each caller that uses the central UI.
Any complex UI required by applications will still have to be implemented locally, so you only solve the issue partially.
Here is what I would do in your case if I really must implement central UI, although I advice strongly against it and would prefer sticking to SOA with some kind of middle ware (ESB or even more primitive EAI software that limits point-to-point integration). You can decide for yourself if it is worth the time and effort:
I would only offer a very limited version of UI that is 100% based on the service layer that already exists and is generated automatically. This means - if you change the service the UI accommodates the new data and displays it automatically. If an application needs complex visualization it must still use the Service layer to retrieve data and implement custom UI locally. In genera, it will be better if UI and visualization are controlled by each application separately. This is much more agile and future-proof.
Hope this helps!
I am building an app in ActionScript 3, that:
makes web requests to various web services;
uses animation on some of interface items;
takes user input, that is sometimes 'foolish'. For instance, user doesn't want to wait for a web response anymore and cancels an action.
Whats the best practice for dealing with all the possible states of an application, and coordinating all the callbacks from completed threads, such as a web service request?
For a simple app, storing a few properties in an App's Singleton does the job. However for a more complex app, the complexity of such tracking grows in a geometric progression.
Example: to enable a particular button, three web requests should complete, two of them are sequential, one uses results from the previous, after both are complete, a panel should appear using slide animation. If a user decides to cancel the procedure during the web requests or the animation phase, he should be able to do so, by hitting another button. And there are dozens of pieces of this kind, with varying logic and requests. So far I am doing this with callbacks and App's Singleton variables. The number of callbacks grows dramatically.
Planning such an app becomes quite difficult. Please also advice a way to sketch such logic and dependencies in a schematic way? I'm not used to UML yet, plain algorithm schemes are more familiar to me.
My advice would be to spend some time looking at a couple of the more popular MVC based frameworks for ActionScript 3.0. These have been designed specifically to service the kind of requirements you detail in a highly decoupled way and with the use of best practices.
I've been using PureMVC for a few years now and have found it to be light, flexible and intuitive. It also has the advantage of being incredibly well-supported (its author is heavily involved in answering questions on the forums), and knowledge of the framework is transferable as it has been ported to a variety of other languages (JavaScript very recently).
A good framework will make a lot of the fundamental architectural decisions for you and leave you free to concentrate on the implementation. With a little bit of investment up-front in understanding the framework, planning applications such as the one you describe becomes much easier as you will be able to look at the requirements and immediately start mapping them to the various actors of your chosen framework.
What problem do MOM (Message Oriented Middleware) solve? Scalability? Integration?
In which domain are they typically used and in which domains are they typically not used?
For example, say, is Google using such solution for it's main search engine or to power GMail?
What about big websites like Walmart, eBay, FedEx (pretty much a Java shop) and buy.com (pretty much an MS shop)? Does MOM solve a need there?
Does it make any sense when you're writing a Webapp where you control the server-side and have an homogenous environment (say tens of Amazon EC2 instances all running Linux + Java JVMs) there and where the clients are, well, Web browsers?
Does it make sense for desktop apps that need to communicate with a server?
Or is it 'only' for big enterprise stuff where you typically have a happy mix of countless of different systems that needs to communicate in a way or another?
I'm a bit confused as to what they're useful for and I think that with example of where they're appropriate and where they're not appropriate I could better understand their use.
This is a great question.
The main uses of messaging are: scaling, offloading work, integration, monitoring, event handling, routing, networking, push, mobility, buffering, queueing, task sharing, alerts, management, logging, batch, data delivery, pubsub, multicast, audit, scheduling, ... and more. Basically: anything where you need data but don't want to make a database request. (Caching is another, longer story).
Another way of looking at this is to notice that many applications used to be built by assuming that users (people) would perform actions that would be fulfilled by executing a transaction on a database (including reads, writes). But today, many actions are not user-initiated. Instead they are application-initiated. For example "tell me when the book that I want to buy is in stock". The best way to solve this class of problems is with messaging of some sort. Whether you call it middleware or web push or real time salad dressing does not matter. It's all messaging.
When you enable applications to initiate or react to events, then it is much easier to scale because your architecture can be based on loosely coupled components. It is also much easier to integrate those components if your messaging is based on a stable, scalable, serviceable tool, preferably using open standard APIs and protocols.
I hope this helps. We try to maintain a list of useful links about messaging here
Please get in touch with questions and comments on any of this, we are dead easy to find.
To address your specific questions:
In which domain are they typically used and in which domains are they typically not used?
Like databases, messaging systems crop up everywhere.
For example, say, is Google using such solution for it's main search engine or to power GMail?
Google uses a lot of home grown technology, but a lot of their open source contributions and known use cases suggest that messaging is (or should be) central to some of the main services.
What about big websites like Walmart, eBay, FedEx (pretty much a Java shop) and buy.com (pretty much an MS shop)? Does MOM solve a need there?
Very much so.
An example use case is scaling web page requests. When the user makes a web request, the web server puts it onto a queue for background processing. This means that the web server can keep working while the request is processed. It also means that the web server does not need to know how the request is handled, making system maintenance, upgrade and rollback much simpler because the main parts are 'decoupled'.
So, anyway, the web request gets processed by a back end service, or possibly by many services, eg 'look up book titles', 'draw shopping cart', 'get advertisement', 'check user account'... Finally all the results get put onto another queue, ready for collection and user response by the web server. Typically the system will include a timeout of around 100ms so that any late requests just get thrown away. The user sees anything that got processed in the time interval. This is one reason why some large ecommerce sites have pages that appear to load in stages.
There are many more use cases...
Does it make any sense when you're writing a Webapp where you control the server-side and have an homogenous environment (say tens of Amazon EC2 instances all running Linux + Java JVMs) there and where the clients are, well, Web browsers?
Definitely. If you have an unknown, or unbounded, number of users, server side instances, and application latencies, then it makes sense to use messaging, even if just as a scalable substrate for non-blocking RPC.
Does it make sense for desktop apps that need to communicate with a server?
In lots of cases. One very common case is when the server pushes events to the desktop app, eg game event, tweets, price feeds in finance, system alerts....
Or is it 'only' for big enterprise stuff where you typically have a happy mix of countless of different systems that needs to communicate in a way or another?
Definitely not only for those 'legacy integration' cases but they are important too. At RabbitMQ, the biggest customers we have in terms of pure scale or message volume are cloud providers and big web application providers.
I will answer only one answer, from prior experience - take a look at this middle-ware that is employed by big companies here - middle-ware has one purpose - to glue dis-connected systems (written in disparate languages) together so that they can interact with one another and streamline the business process - Entera as I have had experience with, creates a middle layer in which the unix box using processes written in C, interact with the mainframe system (DB2, COBOL) via a front-end written in PowerBuilder (I am not naming the company!).
From the description I have given, Entera is a middle-ware which hosts a number of things - smooth integration of the flow of data regardless of the endian format, ability for different languages to talk to the middle-ware broker (a broker is a CORBA or DCE like process, that conforms to 'The Open Group) that listens on a particular port) and is specified by an IDL which makes a process appear to be local - if you understand the terminology used in Remoting under Microsoft's .NET Framework, you are not far off the mark! The middle-ware generates stubs which are linked at compile-time and manages the creation of the process, hosting it off a port, multi-threading at run-time, and also, the modern front-ends (such as .NET, Java, PowerBuilder even the unspeakable VB6...ok...VB.NET for the purists out there) can interact by opening a connection to the specified port on a particular IP address, and using the stubs generated, can interact with it directly.
Obviously, from what was described you can see how the legacy systems can have new life breathed into it and thus scalability of the process, the major downside of this is the cost factor which can run into thousdands of dollars. Big companies who uses mainframes as their back-end processing systems for billing/invoicing, who generate a huge revenue can obviously afford such an expensive product - to them it would seem like throwing pennies into a pool of water...because of the use of middle-ware which prolongs the business process, and breathe new life into it, can extend the business by a good number of years into the future without worrying about 'legacy' tag attached to it.
Incidentally, I carried this out as part of my thesis for my BSc. in Information Systems which covered this commercial front-end. There was an open source version of the middle-ware available on sourceforge called FreeDCE, but development efforts have declined or stopped.
Edit:
#cocotwo: That is exactly what middle-ware does as you said it is a plumbing tool...message oriented middle-ware is not really heard of AFAIK because I would imagine, the processes (functions) would need to be called as if they are locally visible within the application domain of the front-end to make it easy to interact with.
Using messages may have its advantages over RPC calls in that the messages are queued in a safe-holding area in the event that a network disconnection occurs - there may be some data caching going on within that aspect to allow the front-end to continue regardless...it would be useful in the instances of 'updating a status of a particular billing/invoice number' - a one-way write-data to the back-end via the middle-ware.
Ok, big companies would have advanced systems infrastructure in that technicians are constantly around the clock to ensure a smooth delivery of data-flow so that would have to be factored in. The company that I worked with had IBM Global Support contract to fulfill in order to ensure a maximum uptime 99% with 6 nine's after the decimal point...with hot-swapping/balanced-clusters/mirroring systems in place...
Whereas with RPC, if the disconnection occurs, the front-end would have to be restarted or would have to handle the disconnection event. It really depends if the message-queueing middle-ware handles each message in real-time and pass back results to the front-end immediately...
This is where each (Message-queueing and RPC related middle-ware) have their strengths and weaknesses...and also the cost mitigation factor such as support, maximum up-time, development efforts and training - that's a biggie here as middle-ware are really proprietary (despite following the 'The Open Group' layout/standards) and complex to setup and to glue the whole thing together via scripts.
Good answers and discussion here. Our consulting team has two preferred "messaging" solutions: RabittMQ and NXTera a high speed RPC middleware, the contemporary version of Entera mentioned above. My partners and I have developed several solutions using RabittMQ, it is the best tool available in that space right now. Additionally, I happen to work for the company that makes NXTera/Entera.
From experience I can clearly say that both of these products meet the need for reliability and low maintenance as discussed above. There are situations where a messaging service, like RabittMQ, is the right choice -- where Publish and subscribe, certified delivery, Queuing or store-and-forward are required.
In other cases, RPC's (remote procedure calls) are the best and fastest solutions for transactional and distributed processing for enterprise or cloud-based applications. When it is right to use an RPC, but SOAP/.NET (yes these are RPC implementations) are too slow, expensive or complex, a lightwieght high speed RPC middleware like NXTera/Entera is the right choice for us.
There is some use case overlap between RPC middleware and message oriented middleware, and where there are you can use either successfully. But both are strong and dependable choices.
The large companies I work with use both RPC and MoM side-by-side. As far as Internet companies, Google (Protocol Buffers) and Facebook (Thrift) show that RPC's have a roll to play in modern web and cloud-based development.
Situation
I have been working on a project lately where the UI development seems to be way too time consuming. In this case, the "Business Rules" on the server-side are much more complicated than the presentation aspects as far as a Computer Science or complexity perspective.
I've found myself scratching/banging my head against the wall with problems with behaviour that differs from the intuitive approach all the way to being a black hole of time waste and poor documentation, where I might be trying to get a simple UI element to line up correctly.
I'm not complaining; I understand there are complexities and a wide audience to support with web development, but I am perplexed by how long it takes to do what seems should be the easy part compared to how long it takes to write the code with complex logic, math, science, etc.
Question
What are you thoughts and personal experience to go from concept to reality with web development and to do this rapidly, or at least in a way that you can have a sense of how long it might take? I have purposefully not mentioned any frameworks or languages, because I would really like to here what web development stacks you use, what tools or best practices help you get things done faster, and how you end up with code that doesn't feel totally brittle and full of hacks.
Hyperbole, language preferences, and all thoughts welcome, I would at least like to get a sense of what is being used for web development that has a high success rate, even if it isn't the latest and greatest thing around.
I personally have found breaking everything up into small tasks helps.
The way I like to design web pages:
Draw out the design, or photoshop it.
Create the HTML - no CSS, no styling at all
Now add in your style - basic style, like positioning, save making the menu perfect for later
Connect to database if needed / server side code
Now add in any javascript, ajax needed
Tweak it to perfection
If you have all this broken into small tasks, when you get done with each, you feel more motivated to continue working.
Like I said, this is how I do it, and it seems to go quickly, especially since I only get about 1 to 2 hours a night to work.
The answer to this question depends on if you are working alone or leading a group.
If you are leading a group you will want to break apart responsibilities as the following:
Designers - These people should own the creation of graphical mockups and the creation/maintenance of CSS. They should own CSS as a responsibility so that they know not to create outrageous graphical mockups that cannot be created as a webpage without considerable code bloat.
Markup - These people should own the authoring of HTML, accessibility, semantics, RDFa requirements, and any other aspect associated with front end data structure.
UIT - These people should own JavaScript, efficiency requirements, content-management requirements, internal process and front-end tool/process governance, and generally own best practices for all client visible code.
Applications - These people should own server-side application code development, content management system creation/maintenance, and database access requirements. These people are application and services programmers and provide the interface to database and services personnel.
QA - These people test all business requirements of the final product in a certification environment. If errors are seen the bug/ticket should be updated and reassigned. The work is not finished until QA signs off as valid.
Business Owner - The business owner is the person/team responsible for writing the initial project requirements and making a final approving decision about the deployment of the project. This person should have no interface to the technology process outside the drafting of business requirements.
Project Manager - This person ensures that a project is continually moving forward and that milestones are completed in accordance with any deadlines. It is this person and not the business owner that is to interfere with the technology process to ensure things are getting done. This person must act independently of the business owner and must not serve as a tool to the business. The project manager must not own or recommend changes to the requirements to the technology personnel. If changes to the requirements must be made this is a one way process from technology through the project manager to the business owner.
The flow of development should be the following:
1) Designers create the graphic mockup and then reassign the bug/project ticket to the project business owner.
2) Upon business approval the ticket should be reassigned to Markup staff or rejected back to design with specific change requests.
3) Markup writes the HTML and content. Any application or database requirements should be specified by business before the project begins and the Markup team should write code for all possible scenarios. The structure of content should reflect the organization of content on the visual markup completely without regard for presentation. The ticket should be reassigned back to Design for CSS creation.
4) Design writes the CSS to add presentation in compliance with the graphical mockup they created. The design team must have access to the HTML markup to add class attributes as necessary, but should not be allowed to make any other changes. The ticket should be reassigned to Applications to complete all server side requirements.
5) Applications should create all necessary requirements for database access. Ticket should be reassigned to UIT if the prior requirements are satisfactory or reassigned back to Markup for changes/additions.
6) UIT should be the final step to write the JavaScript interactions necessary for user-interface and AJAX requirements. UIT also should proof the prior completed markup for standards conformance, efficiency, and best practices. UIT should quickly reject the project if the work is less the acceptable. If additional Applications work is required reassign to Applications otherwise reassign ticket to QA.
7) QA is the final technology stop. These people test the business and functional requirements of the final product. The project cannot be released to production without QA sign off. If a business requirement fails QA must not sign off. Upon QA sign off the ticket should be reassigned to the business owner.
8) The business owner reviews the project and determines if all requirements are achieved. If changes/additions are required they can be submitted at this time. Changes/additions MUST NOT be submitted earlier, because frequent changes delays all projects. It is the responsibility of the business owner to ensure their initial requirements are complete and specific. If the requirements are not reviewed for fullness it is the fault of the business owner and changes can be submitted at this point. It is because of this responsibility, and other associated business responsibilities, that the business owner deserves to get paid more for being less involved.
That is the most efficient manner to get the job done. Separation of duties is extremely important and adherence to the process is extremely important. If those two things fail the entire process fails and business incurs significantly increased development costs.
If you are acting on your own and not part of a team I would still follow a similar process and push the role business owner onto the client. If the client wants to make changes/additions premature to the project completion then they can pay more money by amending a change addendum to the original requirements contract. You do not loose pay from increased labor because a client cannot make up their damn mind. If that is upsetting then the client can pay even more money for a contract cancellation. This is not mean it is business. If your time is not a valued commodity then you should not be in business as on your own.
I've been using the .NET stack for about 5 years, the ASP.NET MVC stack for about 3 months, and old ASP for 4 about years.
The key to dealing with complexity is mitigating it. In your code, always abstract away complexity to a reasonable level. For example, say there are 10 steps to placing an order. In that case, at a higher level, you would have a method 'SubmitOrder'; under it might be 10 method calls for inserting appropriate records, dealing with inventory and so on. In each of those 'business' layers, you can just deal with these business problem, and even below those layers, you would deal with data and mechanical details. The benefit to all of these layers is that you make each layer deal with a chunk of the work, and as you go up closer to the UI, you have an 'interface' that makes sense to the UI and the way the application needs to flow.
I think you're a little mistaken about UI development. UI development is difficult and usually underestimated in its importance.
There's a need to know the basics - before you jump to HAML, know your HTML so you know what you're abstracting away. Before you jump into jQuery take the time to learn JavaScript basics - you don't need to be a pro, but when you need to add some numbers together you should not go looking for a plugin. Have a good understanding about how to style things with CSS. There's a lot to topics and technologies to learn to be a competent web UI dev.
That said, for greenfield development Rails is pretty sweet. Pick jQuery. And don't choose a platform that hides how the web really works.
I use UI designers. They are excellent for that sort of thing.
I craft my application requirements around what is practical and sometimes easy in terms of front-end work.
My companies does mostly .NET development and we have been successfully using the 'net-tiers' templates for data access layer. The templates are loaded into CodeSmith code generator and pointed against a database. The end result is anything you could possibly think of. It'll generate your DAL, webservice, winforms UI library, web UI library, a sample website and administration tool and more. A great tool to save some development time. Check it out.
As far as actually working on UI, i think it may benefit to actually hire a professional. We have a professional designer who does some contract work with us. All that we do is wire up the UI to our UI components and code.
To speed up getting an HTML page that looks like you want:
First, decide on a design and draw what you want it to look like using a graphics program (if you've got a UI designer they do this step). Then, write static HTML and CSS that matches what you've drawn. Once that's done, write code that outputs HTML that matches the format that you've decided on.
I did this for a pretty complex set of states for a web app, and found that first writing HTML and CSS by hand, without having to wrestle with your server program, makes it go much faster.
The common mistake web developers do most often is that they start writing markup without thinking what they are making and How it will look like. Later when they stuck in any problem then they have to restructure the markup several times which also affect the design too and not an efficient way.
Good developers have habit to design first then develop. What I mean to is it is better to design your website in Photoshop first the start coding. This help them a lot because they knew what they are making and what they can do later as well.
After planning let's talk something about the coding environment. Of we have a nice setup for web development then it will increase our productivity. The major part is Text Editor .It is very important to have a nice Text Editor because we do most of our work on Text Editor. Text Editor plays an important role in increasing our productivity. Well,You can't use notepad or notepad++ in 2019 . They are outdated. The best Editor in 2019 is VSCODE and Sublime Text.
Personally I use sublime Text with some plugins.
Another important part of web development is version control. You can use git for this purpose. There are many online free cloud storages too like github , bitbucket etc. on which we can save our code and access it from any part of the world. Now these days many people are remote workers and to share their work they use git. It is not only helpful in web development but it is also helpful in every software industry. This also allow you to try different styles by simply making branches without messing up with the code.
The least famous but most important part of any software developer or web developer is to use comments while coding because on small project it is very easy to find a particular piece of code but when you are working on large projects or work with a team then comments are necessary because the other developer might not be familiar with your naming conventions. If we use comments then you know what this particular code do.
In last one more thing I would like to suggest for web development is to use browser's developers tool. They are truly awesome and very helpful in finding an error. Developers tools contain console, live code preview, responsive website preview with various mobile devices options and much more.
Some useful plugins for web development are:
Emmet
Prettify
Color Picker
File Icon
Git gutter
Integrated Terminal
Hope you get the answer of your question
Developers are extremely prolific individuals. They are continually improving their tools in order to increase their production and produce better outcomes faster.
For over a decade, I've been doing full-stack web development. One of the most difficult hurdles I'm having right now is that I need to focus on a range of tasks in a short amount of time, from designing user interfaces to deploying web applications.
To speed up my output, I use a number of technologies and frameworks. For UI, I usually use Bootstrap 4 and Bulma for most of my projects when it comes to building responsive web apps.
As I continue to focus on developing a variety of Web applications, I've seen that there are certain similar themes that I've noticed when doing so:
Consider the following example:
User Interface for Login/Signup/Forget Password
Layouts like a dashboard
Layouts for User Profiles
Form of Configuration
The list could go on and on.
I believe that most full-stack developers have come across the same UI pattern when developing their Web Apps UI.
So, to make the above procedure go faster, we created a simple tool that allows you to drag and drop — pre-made Bootstrap 4 components like Signup Form with Cover Image, Login Form, Dashboard Layout, and so on...
But wait, there are already a number of comparable Bootstrap builders out there, so why do I need to create another one?
The majority of Bootstrap Builders are focused on creating websites, however we choose to create this specifically for Creating Faster Web Apps UI.
Other aspects have also been taken into account.
Because drag and drop is sometimes a limiting choice for developers to modify the layout, we created an in-built full-featured Code Editor that allows you to generate numerous HTML, CSS, and JS files to extend the UI of your Web Apps.
In conclusion, you may make use of the following advantages.
Drag & Drop — Pre-Made Bootstrap Blocks — Dashboard Layouts, Signup
Forms, *Login Forms, E-Commerce Order Layouts, and more
Drag and Drop — Default Bootstrap Components to improve the layout
even more, such as Buttons, Cards, and so on...
Create/Edit UI enhancements using HTML, CSS, and JS.
Use the entire project for production or future development by
downloading it.
Publish to Netlify to show off your work to potential clients.
I hope, you enjoy using this tool for creating responsive Web Apps UI faster.
I want to design a website but I don't know from where to start.
Is there a beginners' guide to start with?
How much dedication do you hope to provide? If you merely want to design a single website, quickly and dirty, there's a plethora of open source web templates available online, with clean and basic HTML/XHTML design strategies that you could modify, and provide content for.
Such as this and that.
Alternatively, if you would like to design your own websites from scratch and have full technical knowledge in the field (the proper way). Pick up a book or two on HTML/XHTML/XML, with documentation on content management systems, php, etc.
You'd soon find that in the beginning your development would be gradual and at best, slow. If you put in sufficient effort, you would find that you get to the point where you can quickly design sites confidently, which best illuminate your content.
You should be familiar with this and this
Try this Web Design from Scratch
I understand by website you mean some kind of web-app. And by design you mean, not just the page design but the design of the web-app. First, you have to understand the anatomy of a web-app. The major components are:
Database is used to store user and application data for long term. A database provides query functionality (SQL), backup on one installation and restore on another, triggers when a data entry changes, and constraints that must be satisfied by the data tables.
Web Server, also called Http Server hosts the web application.
Web Browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.
When a user types a URL into the web browser, the web server forwards the URL to the corresponding web application. The web application performs the needed tasks (which may involve reading or writing into the database) and returns a new html page to the user via www.
Some components of the web application are:
Database access objects are representations of objects that encapsulate interaction with database tables.
Business Logic is the main logic of the application. Here we implement the search functionality using Lucene library, for example.
Action Handler handles a http request received from the user, for example when she types a URL or when she clicks on the "submit" button. These are Http GET and POST requests. The Action Handler uses the business logic to drive the actions.
Data view on the web brower is constructed using some template library (which usually produces javascript user interface code for the web browser). For interactivity one may use Ajax techniques.
Almost all web-apps separate the model, view and controller of a web application. The view deals with the display, the model deals with data and the controller deals with control/functioning. See http://www.uidesign.net/Articles/Papers/UsingMVCPatterninWebInter.html.
Several frameworks implement MVC. The most easy ones to get started are Ruby on Rails and Django (over which an open source social network called Pinax too is written). There are much more comprehensive frameworks and libraries in java too (for a single web appl you may need to join several of these libraries), such as spring, webwork, tapestry, lucene (for search), sitemesh (for page decoration). Many java web apps run on tomcat web server and with mysql database.
I started with http://w3schools.com. Make sure you're using Firefox and the Firebug addon. Get your hands dirty then get familiar with the web design community.
I have CSS Mastery by Andy Budd on my desk and it's a good, readable, short, yet deep guide to CSS.
Don't Make me think has also become my mantra of web design.
Overall, you're going to produce a lot of crap--as I have--before you get good. If you have someone to look over what you're doing that'll be the best help. Personal drive will matter the most in the long run though, so stick with it and keep learning.
Liz Castro has a good book too.