On my current project, we're developing a "designer" tool (with GWT) that allows users to build forms in their browser. These forms are displayed in various channels (e.g. web, mobile, sms) to capture data and make decisions based on user input.
When I joined the project, it was in a proof-of-concept phase and the form definitions created where serialized as XML (using JAXB) with element names that seemed logical. Now that we're moving the PoC to production mode, we're thinking it might be better to change our form definitions to leverage something that's more "industry standard". If nothing else, it'll help with marketing. ;-)
I've found a number of options and wondering if anyone has experience using them.
User Interface Markup Language (UIML)
USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language (UsiXML)
Numerous others: including AAIML, AUIML, XIML, XUL, XAML and XForms
If you've developed some sort of "form designer" tool that renders to multiple channels, I'd love to hear about your experience. Did you use some sort of industry standard to define your form elements, layout, etc. or did you come up with your own?
Thanks,
Matt
I work on Orbeon Forms, which is an XForms implementation. We primarily use XHTML + XForms to describe forms. I might be biased ;), but I have never seen anything that comes close to the power of XForms when it comes to describing forms.
In Orbeon Forms, we target browsers (mixed client/server-side implementation which doesn't require any plugin). But it would be perfectly feasible to target other devices based on the same description. We have also been busy for the last year and half doing a Form Builder, which now ships with Orbeon Forms.
Related
I wish to create web application for users. So far, I have been developing mock-ups on PowerPoint.
I've asked around and I've been told to study HTML, Javascript, CSS. The books I find from https://www.allitebooks.in/ are for super-beginners, i.e. how to write "hello world", how to use css to select font and color.
Then I saw that Duolingo wrote it's website in Scala. To me, Duolingo is a user-friendly, easy-to-use website that allows user interactions to type, drag-and-drop.
But can Scala be useful?
Right now, I am looking to create a web application that takes user input and dynamically updates webpages. The web application is mostly graphics (I'm more of a visual person)
Also, user should be able to drag and drop things. For instance, if there is a bowl of fruit, how to allow users to type in description, and drag it where they wish?
One more thing. If user decides to save data, it should be saved on the cloud (user has account, but they don't have to download software).
Application is free for individual users, but huge organizations need to pay nominal fee.
A website being user-friendly doesn't have anything to do with what language it was built with. A good design is what makes a website more appealing and as you said user-friendly. Designs are typically made in softwares like Photoshop, Sketch,Xd... Now once you have a design you like, comes the web dev part of building a website. Typically this is split into two parts:
Frontend : Here you implement the design using HTML, CSS and JS. There are no alternatives as browsers only understand these languages. HTML is used to create the structure of the design. CSS is used to style the different elements. JS is a programming language used to make pages more dynamic.
Backend: Here we deal with tasks than need to be tackled on the server i.e Login, singup,send email etc. Now because a server can be thought of just being a computer,you can technically use any language that has capabilities to make http requests. Here Scala can be used. Typical languages include PHP, Python, NodeJS etc.
I kept this brief and didn't want to go in much detail, just to paint a picture of what is used for which purpose. I recommend before thinking about building a website like duolingo, to take some kind of course that explains in detail how websites are built.
I need a UI library with Angular components to display and edit state chart diagrams with data bindings, so the diagrams can be translated bidirectional between the visual diagram and the native statemachine model entities in my application. I have pored over pages of google search to no avail.
I must admit I am a newbie to Angular and my expertise is to the level of using standard components available from npmjs repository. So far, I have been comfortable using different ui components such as ngx-bootstrap, valour, etc. I do not have the competence or know-how to build new components using diagram libraries with JS/JQuery inside my angular project to realise the requirements. I would really appreciate if any UI Toolkit/Library available for this. Even reasonably priced commercial frameworks are acceptable for me.
Thanks in advance for any help.
I have already checked out free/open-source/commercial frameworks such as Telerik Kondo, SyncFusion, Ionic, JQWidgets, etc. I have pored over their documentation published for free. However, I always end up in either (a) they do not suit my needs, or (b) it involves developing this component myself. I know how it sounds, but my need is similar to needing a car; not design & build one myself. I do not have the ability to do it.
I need support for Angular 7 or 8 to be precise.
I'm trying to find a CMS that can be incorporated into an existing MVC3 app.
I've played with N2, and can't get the damn thing to work in VS2010 or with .NET 4.
Umbarco doesn't appear to support MVC yet
Orchard looks great, but wants to own the whole application.
DNN is just a mess.
Any other brilliant solutions?
Post-mortem Dec 2011
This is an old post, but I thought I'd share my experiences with Orchard, and why I decided to go a different direction.
NHibernate
Aside from the very large number of transactions per page (literally dozens in some cases), each and every query was executed using sp_executesql. While not quite as bad as using Exec(), this rubs me the wrong way. Currently, my database is locked down so that applications can only execute stored procedures - that is, they can't perform select/update/delete, list entities such as tables, get any metadata, etc. This is a requirement for tier-wise unit testing, compile-time verification of the database, security and encapsulation of database logic from the application code.
Source Deployment
Orchard requires that the entire source for your site (views, .cs source files, etc) is deployed to the production server. The sheer number of source files that need to deployed boggles the mind.
Integration with an existing application
The manner in which Orchard is structured effectively requires it to be the point of entry for the web application. This means that you're going to spend some time modifying and reimplementing your app to get it to play nice with Orchard.
Conclusion
There were quite a few other issues that I encountered, but those are the highlights. Individually, each of those could have been a deal breaker. Together, they removed Orchard as a viable solution.
I'm now evaluating Telerik's Sitefinity. It's not MVC, which saddens me, but:
The admin interface is extremely powerful. Aside from a master page and some stylesheets that I put together in VS, we've been able to handle all of the layout via Sitefinity's admin tools.
I mean, it's really powerful. You can use the admin interface to edit the admin interface. Think about that for a minute.
Widgets are implemented as ASP.NET user controls. Most of my existing controls just dropped right in with zero modifications.
Database access is handled via Telerik's OpenAccess ORM. While Sitefinity doesn't natively use stored procedures, OpenAccess fully supports using them for all operations. Also, according to Telerik, OpenAccess does not, in any way, rely on reflection, which provides significant performance benefits in heavy-load apps.
There are several solutions available for using Razor markup within widgets, which is one of the great benefits (to me) of using MVC. Also, I've been told that native Razor support is in active development.
It's not free. In reality, however, a few grand barely breaks the noise floor in terms of development time.
Super crazy fast. Startup time is a bit on the slow side, but once it's running, it's very quick.
Built on top of Telerik's awesome, proven RAD controls.
Apologies for the long post. Hopefully this will be helpful.
You might find these projects useful. You can probably model a simple CMS based on one of their projects.
MvcCms
MvcMS
Atomic CMS
Mytrip.mvc
Try Web Noodles..The new CMS developed using mvc3. WebNoodles.It is easy to integrate .But the thing is it is still in beta stage..But you must give it a try ...
I already know Asp.net and C#. I want to build web site, and I need to choose between learning Silverlight or learning Ajax.
The site will be (visual) with nice tables and a little graphics, and with hard work with db.
My question is what is the recommended way for me, and the reasons.
Thank u and sorry for my English.
Microsoft's current position would indicate that you should go with Asp.Net + HTML + CSS + jQuery (I would use MVC as it gives you much better control as to what gets rendered in the page, but that's just a recommendation).
http://mashable.com/2010/10/29/microsoft-silverlgiht-html/
Even if we ignore all the news regarding this shift from SilverLight to what's commonly being called "HTML5", learning & using jQuery + HTML + CSS has several advantages:
From a personal standpoint, all the knowledge you'll get will be useful for C# and for any other languages you need to use in the future for developing web apps.
Using Silverlight (or flash) you are basically telling search engines to ignore you. Ok, maybe it's not so radical, but you'll have a hard time trying to make your page climb positions in Google & Bing, if you intend to do so.
Silverlight makes you depend on a browser plugin. Your page won't work in any OS or browser that doesn't have the plugin installed.
You'll find much more information and documentation for jQuery + HTML than for Silverlight, as jQuery is used not only with C#, but also with PHP, Java...
As a benefit of using Silverlight, however, you will gain the ability to stream DRM'd content (it's actually Silverlight's and Flash's main strength right now). How useful that will be to you, I don't know.
The question promotes somewhat subjective answers, so please understand that the answers will vary from person to person.
I would prefer AJAX in this instance. If you need to do a lot of animation then silverlight is probably your best bet. However, if you're looking just to display tabular data (with some graphics), the most commonly used approach (by my observation) is to use AJAX to populate tabular data.
The most common use I see for Silverlight these days is media streaming and proof of concepts.
I would like to build a web application where users can create forms with very few technical knowledge. Since they need "advanced" features like validations, required fields and some more, I am currently evaluating XForms and web forms 2.0 (from HTML 5 spec). Concerning web forms, my research couldn't find any answers for the following questions:
Are there any (JavaScript) libraries out there which make web forms fully available in browsers which have currently no support for them (i.e. Firefox)?
Is there a "web forms editor" which allows creating input and select fields, with setting attributes like the type, required, ...? It has to be something visual, and must create "nice" html.
Any help/ hints would be appreciated!
I thought I'd register to post a message about this, as I've been looking into this as well in the last few weeks.
WebForms2 on Google Code tries to implement most web form features, but it hasn't been updated in a while. http://code.google.com/p/webforms2/
About editors, I don't think there are any. The HTML5 Forms spec hasn't been finalised, and browsers barely support it right now. There doesn't seem to be any consensus about how the inputs will be styled just yet either.
And I can't seem to post more than 1 link per message just yet. So see message above for the other link ;-)
There is some information about HTML5 Forms support on Anne van Kesteren's blog posted 10 days ago. http://annevankesteren.nl/2010/04/html5-forms
Cheers!