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.
Related
Currently, I have a ASP.net 3.5 web application for which I currently am working on the UI.I have been out of touch of doing web ui's for a while.
When i last did UI related work (way back in 2007), i used the Ajax Control Toolkit - specially the extenders like MaskedEdit Extender etc for implementing a lot of the UI functionality i.e restricting the user from entering incorrect data / formatting etc.
Question 1:-
Is there a newer / better / easier way of implementing the functionality similar to the extenders provided by AjaxToolkit that someone would recommend?
Question 2
Also, my current application needs to support multiple cultures in terms of the number / date formatting. In my experience with Ajax extenders, for eg in MaskedEditExtender, I would have to specify the Mask explicitly which defeats the whole purpose of it being able to switch formats depending on the currently selected culture. Is anyone aware of the latest / greatest way in terms of controls etc that I can achieve this?
Note: I am open to lightweight 3rd party controls that could help me do this but would prefer not to touch heavycontrols like infragistics / telerik kinds mainly due to their learning curve / cost.
I currently use Devexpress in the office and at home i use jQuery. Microsoft suggest instead of using the AJAX Toolkit that you use jQuery. This seems to be the best way to go.
jQuery Toolkit for ASP.net is supposed to be quite easy but i find that jQuery UI does everything that you need it to do and doesn't have too much of a learning curve. Using jQuery is much more straightforward than neat javascript and is a useful skill in today's climate.
A combination of:
web services (asmx or mvc)
jQuery ajax
jQuery UI
Along with the plethora of jQuery plug-ins available would be my recommendation for both light weight, and a good abundance of supporting help as well as plug-ins and very active development.
IF you need a bit more you should look a the http://www.obout.com/ controls as an option.
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.
I looked already and couldn't find anything good.
So a question is, are there any good web frameworks that would allow to easily develop GUI for the majority of high end phones? By this I mean
It would have to work "the same" on majority of high end phones (forget the low cost ones)
It would have to simplify the development and hide the ugly details from developer
Clear design and good documentation. Also some stability on the market.
The focus is on good looking and easy to make GUI. Javascript is only a plus.
So basically I am looking for something like jQuery or maybe ExtJS for phone development.
EDIT:
It would be a big plus if it could be consumed in Delphi
EDIT 2:
If it was not clear, I am looking for a web base solution that would run in a browser. So the target is HTML output and not native code.
To contribute to the subject. I found a question that has answers to such topic:
iWebkit vs. JQTouch vs. iUI
So there seem to be the following frameworks:
iUI
jQTouch
WebApp.net
iWebKit
Yahoo! Blueprint
JQTouch
PhoneGap
Sencha Touch
jQueryMobile
PhoneGap supports a wide variety of phones but it does so by making native (or interpreted I don't know) code to run on them, so it is a no go for me.
Yahoo! Blueprint supports a lot of phones also, but seems to need a special framework to run on. So also a no go.
jQTouch and WebApp.net look promissing, but they only support webkit based browsers. Yes these are in majority these days probably, but Blackberry for one has non webkit based browser and Blackberry is very important to me.
I will keep looking, in the meantime, don't be shy to contribute ;)
EDIT
Found this wiki about some frameworks. Most are embedded.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_phone_web_based_application_framework
EDIT2
I added Sencha Touch (www.sencha.com/products/touch) to the list as it was added after this post was created. They are the former ExtJS and now have the WebKit based mobile solution.
EDIT3
I added jQuery Mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/) to the list as it was added after this post was created.
Sencha Touch seams to be the solution. Since UniGui for Delphi/Lazarus already supports eye catching ExtJS it would be ideal if it extends to Sencha Touch. We will see.
I'm confused, do you want a web framework that runs on the web for phones (like jqTouch), or are you looking for something that will create native apps provides some amount of portability (like MonoTouch/C#)?
lightweight jquery-like alternative that works on android & iphone (& possibly blackberry & winmo) is xui, cfr. http://xuijs.com/documentation and http://github.com/brianleroux/xui.
edit: xui is more about javascript and less about a good looking GUI, so this might not be what you're looking for after all.
http://jquerymobile.com/
... when its released in "Late 2010".
I have to do a quite big project in J2ME for school.
I didn't used 'till now J2ME, so are there J2ME MVC frameworks
for which I can find books or at least very good online tutorials?
MVC is what I'm looking for because we have to do unit testing and
I'm familiar with MVC from ASP.Net MVC, Rails and Grails.
So, any good framework to use with this project?
We are developing this project for Blackberry cells.
With Java you don't really need a framework, creating MVC-based apps is just about using the principles correctly, so having controllers dictating the response to any action and so on. I'd think about using Observers to help by having your views observe your models and controllers observe your views (to get events and so on.) Unit-testing this then becomes quite simple.
If only, the fact is that every handset is very different - its extremely difficult to build an app that spans all the major J2ME-capable handsets that looks half way decent by following the basic principles. Which is why we end up doing things like using sprite based fonts (ugh). I don't think I've ever worked a mobile project using J2ME where we've managed to stick to just the standard J2ME (and, we try very hard). Even things that should be standard, like reading a JSON feed from a server, persistent storage or even really simple things like sprite rotation is really not very standard at all (yes, I'm looking at you RIM). And, then throw a requirement for Android into the mix and you're done.
I've used Polish, and its really very good. Commercial license is not cheap (but worth it), but for a school project its free. Flash (cough) is also a good alternative too. These days, personally, I find my projects need to span iPhone (Objective-C), Android (Java), Nokia (J2ME) and Blackberry (pseudo-J2ME) and it gets real tricky to not use a commercial framework (or roll your own, if you've the time and inclination). I'm open to ideas for frameworks that span all those platforms?
I'm not sure anything like this exist, as mentioned by previous poster, you just follow the principles of the pattern. However, look at J2ME Polish, it's a very nice framework which makes your life with mobile java much easier. Particularly strong features they offer is the usage of CSS for displays - this gives you pretty good "V" part in MVC pattern.
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.