I'm digging into Node.js now and the whole idea seems brilliant to me. But I'm interested in what the benefits of using Node.js are when developing "traditional" sites with a bit of AJAX and no realtime features. When I say traditional, I mean the sites that one usually builds using MVC frameworks on platforms like PHP, ASP.NET, etc.
I know that the Express framework is popular, but the question is more about what I would gain by switching to Node.js rather than simply "Can I do MVC in Node?".
Node has the advantage of
having a rich open source community with third party modules that solve most problems
having a low level API with a minimal amount of "default" bloat
reducing language context switching
having a decent level of performance
allowing you to manipulate the HTTP server programatically within your application
I guess this url: How to decide when to use Node.js? -is all you need.I am making this as community wiki.
Related
I'm looking for a set of Javascript based UI components for a web app I'm building and have found that many of the best looking web apps were built with the Capuccino framework; see http://www.getflow.com/, http://www.picsengine.com/home/ and http://timetableapp.com/ for examples.
However, I'm not a Cocoa developer and have no interest in learning Objective-J. Ideally, I'd find a set of components that provide the visual end result of Capuccino apps without the underlying weight of the framework.
I have seen the Aristo jQuery UI them (http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/482577430/introducing-aristo-a-jquery-ui-theme), but jQuery UI just doesn't seem to have the depth of components available in Capuccino.
I realize this may be a long shot, but I figured it can't hurt to ask. :)
Thanks.
As another option, there is jQuery UI: nice if you are already familiar with jQuery, with the plus side of not being too heavyweight, but may not have all the components you need pre-defined. A nice thing is that it encourages to write the HTML in a way that degrades gracefully when your application in older browsers.
Maybe sproutcore is an alternative for you, although it requires you to hand-code everything in javascript from scratch. It offers most basic components and is easily adjustable to your personal design goals. Sproutcore is used in Apples Mobile Me and in some other big projects.
Another possibility might by vaadin which offers a rich set of prebuild controls and is based on Googles GWT javascript compiler. But it only makes sense if you are developing in a java environment.
What's your experience in using web technologies (HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript) to implement part of the functionality of a GUI application? Pros and cons, please.
No servers, relational databases, AJAX, or cookies for session management, nor an existing webapp either, but rather a GUI app that uses web widgets (like Qt WebKit) to render and handle substantial parts of the UI, while taking advantage of a GUI framework to achieve an even richer interaction and better desktop integration.
I've already validated that the approach is possible using PyQt. Content can be rendered from the file system or from strings, and URL requests (images or clicks) can be captured and served by the form's event handlers. CSS and JavaScript are supported, perhaps with some limitations.
# ...
self.webView.page().setLinkDelegationPolicy(
QtWebKit.QWebPage.DelegateExternalLinks
)
#...
class TotiMainWindow(QtGui.QMainWindow):
def linkClicked(self, url):
pass # events arrive here
Note: This question is different from this one and this one made before, among other things because there is no requirement to use web technologies on the GUI, but there is the requirement that the application should work without a network connection available, and should integrate well with the default desktop over different platforms, without previous infrastructure requirements (no .NET, Java, browsers, or database servers).
Note: I posted a different version of this question on PMS but found very little experience with this approach there.
Closing Note
I just found most of the information I was looking for in a series of blog posts by André Pareis.
I think the largest advantage to using web markup like HTML/CSS and other web technologies is that desktop apps may very well have their days numbered.
As we speak, Google engineers are working on the Chromium OS, which essentially consists of a single GUI application... the browser...
Now, while nothing may never actually come of it, there is clearly a rising trend in the number of applications accessible through a web browser, accessible anywhere. It seems to me that this is the future of application development.
By using these technologies, this becomes one less headache you have to deal with when or if you determine that your app should be available as a web application.
Update: A few years ago, we developed an Agent Desktop for our call center that is essentially a local application that opens sockets to integrate with the phone system. The user interface the agents use is built with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and the experience is stunning. When we released our latest update in 2010 with a professional CSS redesign, our agents were all very impressed with not only how easy it was to interact but also how easy it was to use.
In the future we will port this 100% to the browser, but for now it needs to be a local application because of the COM integration with the phone system.
We did exactly this for a project back when Windows XP was new.
This gave my team several benefits:
A good-looking UI with relatively little effort
Easily change the style of the UI in a consistent manner using CSS
Relatively simple integration with C++ (invoking functions from the ui and vice versa)
The drawbacks we saw were:
Some not-so-good firewalls considered accessing internal resources (ie other html pages in the ui) to be a web request
Adding and accessing the needed resources could in some cases be a bit cumbersome
It was possible set properties in Internet Explorer that would prevent JS from running in the application
Note that some of Windows XP:s programs are using this approach.
This probably works best with small, more Wizard-like parts of the ui (which our ui consisted almost entirely of).
I have since then not really been involved in ui projects, so I cannot really tell you whether this approach is still valid... I know that MFC-based applications will let you use HTML-based dialogs though.
In a similar situation in 2005 I created a stand-alone webapp using XForms, CSS, JavaScript, XML and XML Schema for offline data retrieval and verification. With a good XForms -> HTML + JS transformer (Chiba) it did the job with no bug fixes after the initial release. It was used for 6-12 months (IIRC) by about a dozen engineers for a project gathering test data in the tunnel of the Large Hadron Collider. The biggest surprise of that project was just how much you get for free when going for a web platform, even for offline use. Highly recommended.
The major problem is that it reduces your development speed, or the quality of your user interface. A lot. Unless you're using Seaside, it is much faster to develop a desktop app.
There is quite some number of applications built on top of Mozilla platform. It isn't 100% web technology, as instead of HTML you use XML based XUL, but the rest is indeed web stack (JavaScript, CSS). The most successful of these it the OpenKomodo and it's commercial big brother Komodo IDE.
On the other hand, as far as Qt goes, the newest version 4.7 you can build GUI using QML language. Don't let the name mislead you, it's not markup, it acctually JavaScript with app-specific extensions.
First of all, I'm sorry because of this lame question. But I'm kind of lost in all dynamic-html, ajax, etc stuff. So i decided get help from the pros.
Basically what I'm trying to do is creating a web page which have dynamic content(messages) coming from a web server(asp.net or php) presented in floating(movable by viewer) boxes in the page. And those boxes will be created dynamically upon a trigger from the server. And the viewer should be able to draw lines between those boxes to connect them(this information will also be sent/received to/from the server). Now which technologies should i use to have this? Is a combination of ajax+html5+jscript enough for this? Or do i need libraries like Yahoo's YUI, Google's GWT, etc.? Or, is flash/silverlight the best solution? Or something else?
Thanks
I'm no pro but I'd go for the HTML+JS+CSS version. As for the libraries, they'll help you in getting your content accross the many browsers and provide you with some nice utilities ;)
You don't need frameworks to do any of this. They might make the job easier, but, ultimately, they'll produce HTML and Javascript that make use of AJAX to get the job done.
Sounds like a big job, so be sure consider appropriate server-side and Javascript frameworks, and good luck.
You first have to decide between HTML5/JS/CSS, Flash and Silverlight for your client technology. Consider the client machines you need to support (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad etc.)
You then pick your server-side language/platform. AJAX is your communication medium.
If you're going with HTML5/JS/CSS you'd like to pick a JS framework to speed up development. jQuery makes for quick coding. Other frameworks may have more features but are more abstracted from plain JS. You might want to use GWT if you're more familiar with Java than Javascript.
Can anyone recommend a GUI builder tool for creating DHTML web apps using AJAX to communicate with a web service backend? I'd like to avoid having to mess around with designing HTML, marshalling/unmarshalling data, checking for browser compatibility, etc. The tool should have a library of widgets that can be put into an application and hooked up to functionality, and be extensible enough to be able to define custom widgets. Of course free and/or open source is preferrable but I would consider proprietary tools too.
Also to what extent does the choice of GUI tool affect what platform or language I would use for the backend? If the GUI is just calling a web service then I should be able to use anything on the server-side to provide that interface but maybe some gui-side tools use a proprietary data exchange format that requires some specific server-side code?
Edit: I don't need a widget that can be dragged, I want an IDE that allows one to build a gui easily (i.e. a RAD tool).
WaveMaker is open source, runs on J2EE.
If you're comfortable with Java, maybe you could try Google Web Toolkit? http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
I'm using Wavemaker and it does exactly what are u asking...
It is really easy to use and very perfomant....
I believe Dreamweaver does some of this, but in my opinion such editors are not a good idea. They produce horrible, unmaintainable server-side code and are quite inflexible.
Wavemaker beats everything else I have used hands down. Applications can be developed rapidly, has drag and drop, can connect to any web service, and has unmatched database management tools. The only problem with it is that it has kept changing hands/ownership so much and its future direction is not clear.
Delphi for PHP from Codegear has some of this capability, but I would agree with ceejayoz that such tools don't necessarily make for nice code.
On Dan's suggestion I took a look at GWT. I'd heard of it before but never looked at it that closely and it seems pretty interesting. Certainly it takes away the annoyance of pixel pushing and making things work in multiple browsers. I also tried searching for "gwt rad tools" and came up with a couple of results:
Instantiations GWT Designer (commercial, $59/year)
Wirelexsoft Vistafei (still in beta but will have a free and a commercial version)
I'll take a look at these but if anyone's used something else let me know.
I'm a developer who builds mainly single page client side web applications where state in maintained on the client-side. Lately some of the applications have become very complex with very rich domain models on the client-side and increasingly complicated UI interactions.
As we've gone along we've implemented some very useful design patterns such as Passive View MVC, Observers, bindings, key-value observers (cocoa). I have recently got a lot of inspiration from the work of SproutCore and Cappuccino which are both JavaScript web frameworks inspired by Cocoa.
Obviously all of the problems that developers are having now in building complex web applications have been solved by desktop developers many moons ago. As few months ago all I knew about Cocoa was that is was some Apple thing, now it has had a big impact in the way I develop my web applications.
I was wondering if anyone who has more experience in building desktop GUI's than I, could point me any other frameworks out there which may also give me inspiration in terms of design patterns and structures to use for my JavaScript web applications?
I really don't care what languages or platform these frameworks reside in, as long as they can teach me something about good application design in general.
Fowlers GUI Architectures seems to be a reasonable survey done at a high level, I don't know how complete it is, however.
Have you taken a look at Cappuccino? It's a Javascript client-side framework, very heavily inspired by Cocoa. The Cappuccino creators even wrote their own Objective-C runtime in JavaScript so that Cappuccino apps can be written in Objective-J, an Objective-C-like syntax for JavaScript.