Related
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 2 years ago.
Improve this question
I am building an admin style, data-driven, internal business application (as opposed to a public facing website). I'd like to use a Bootstrap based template (even considering for-purchase templates from a Bootstrap marketplace or something), but the key requirement is that the site must be accessible (WCAG 2.0 AA compliant).
I know Bootstrap has had some accessibility issues (some colors, some javascript, etc.), but I also know that a lot of that has been getting better as newer versions were getting released. Bootstrap documentation itself offers only a small section on Accessibility and no mention of WCAG 2.0. Does anyone know what the latest status is for accessibility and Bootstrap (ver 3.3.7 at the moment)?
I've also come across Accessible+, which is a Bootstrap-based template, but I'm not sure whether the design fits well for the application I'm building, as it seems more public-facing (product/sales based). But it might work.
Alternatively, does anyone have any other Bootstrap based templates to recommend (free or not) which would work well for my need here, while also being very accessible?
I develop and maintain custom bootstrap websites that emphasize WCAG 2.0 AA compliance, but I'm looking for a good Bootstrap based template from which I can develop smaller projects without investing the time for a custom project.
One thing I'm noticing is that the few templates and themes out there advertising as WCAG 2.0 AA / 508 Compliant are NOT actually compliant, including Accessible+. Using the online WebAIM tool on their template it's registering 8 WCAG 2.0 AA coding errors, 16 alerts, and 4 contrast errors on the front page.
The WebAIM online tool is just a starting point, even getting zero errors on the tool does not make a site "compliant" there is no such thing as a "compliant" website ... the criteria is subjective. There are less and compliant and more compliant sites.
Validating with the WebAIM tool does definitely make a site more compliant. To get any sort of certification that a site is compliant actual lab testing by individuals with disabilities is required. Even then, a site can get a certification from the third party that does the testing, there is no universal compliance stamp that the Dept of Justice would refer to if a complaint was filed for a site.
Another thing I've found is that one needs to be careful about what third party to use for a certification of a site. Some are very expensive and do not necessarily have much credibility. The non-profit WebAIM program at Utah State University is one of the most credible and reasonably priced. Their site also offers some of the best overall information about web accessorily and compliance. Note, I have no affiliation whatsoever with that organization other than attending training there.
I'm in the same situation. I'm not sure about how the accesibility of Bootstrap has been improved since the 3.1.1. version.
I also saw the Accessible+ template, but it has been not updated since January, and I'm not sure if can fit what I need, so paying for it will be my last option.
These were my two main options:
Assets CMS GOV Framework. Its a modification of Bootstrap 3.1.1 with accesibility improvements to acomplish with the section 508 compliance (kind of USA govern alternative to WCGA 2.0, but a little less restrictive than WCGA AA). You can find it here http://assets.cms.gov/resources/framework/3.4.1/Pages/ the problem is that the package is just a bunch of folders with different scripts, styles, etc and I don't know where to start. I took a look to a previous version of the framework http://assets.cms.gov/resources/framework/2.0/Pages/ which was based on Bootstrap 2 and those files seems more like the kind of content I was expecting to find when I download it. So... after a couple of hours thinking if all those folders in the package wehere modificated, or where the originals and how to start, I declined about it... Maybe you can see it more clear.
The other option, which I'm starting to use, is the current Bootstrap version, with the Paypal Bootstrap plugin for accesibility https://github.com/paypal/bootstrap-accessibility-plugin. This seems more clear for me to figure out how to use, but is from 2 years ago and I don't have too much hope about it.
Anyway... both options are from a couple of years ago. I spent two days searching for anything else but seems that nobody cares a lot about accessibility nowadays. Several changes in accesibility have been implemented on Bootstrap since 3.1.1 but I think still can be far from be ready for a WCAG 2.0 AA.
In Bootstrap 4 beta seems to be more accesibillity improvements, but I don't know if they are enough to accomplish the WCAG 2.0 AA standards.
It will be good to know if you find something interesting!!
Disclaimer: I am the author of Accessible+ accessible bootstrap template as linked here by the question opener.
Accessible+ is in fact based on ASSETS which is based on Bootstrap.
I developed it because there were no Bootstrap accessible options available.
The main purpose was a regular template for "non-admin" websites.
Since I did not get overwhelming requests for doing an Admin template version, I never took the time to design one. But - I might in the future.
In any case, I can offer personal customization, even if you ask me to just make you a general "skeleton" for admin side.
Thanks for choosing to buy the template, I know it doesn't suit your needs 100% and I hope you succeed in converting it the way you need.
I was searching as well in the past for an accessible Bootstrap 4 template but found nothing. The ones I found failed in most accessibility tests.
Recently though, I searched again and found the "Labinator A11y-Bootstrap" template. It is basically an accessible Bootstrap 4 premium template that satisfies the WCAG 2.1 Level AAA guidelines. It also comes with an accessibility toolbar.
If you need though a free template and have good coding knowledge, then any modern Bootstrap 4 template can be made accessible with proper expertise in web development and accessibility. You can start by reading the official accessibility page of Bootstrap at (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/getting-started/accessibility/) then familiarize yourself with the WCAG 2.1 Level AA/AAA guidelines. There are some helpful checklists for those online, especially at the official website of WCAG.
Thereafter, you have to test your template with several web accessibility tools and verify the results manually. Two good tools are AChecker.ca and wave.webaim.org. Please note that all current web accessibility tools are not perfectly accurate - take them with a grain of salt. They can serve as a good pointer in the right direction rather than an ultimate guide.
It is good to note as well that Bootstrap 4+ is much better in terms of accessibility than Bootstrap 3+. As a full-time web developer working in the field, I would never pick Bootstrap 3+ or any template based on it when we have the modern Bootstrap 4.
I hope that helps!
* Please let me know if this question is in wrong forum before down voting. I will move it *
Hi,
I am researching open source industrial alternatives for LoadRunner/NeoLoad for web application testing that can be run on windows machines. I want to know if there are any open source tools which can provide functionality like LoadRunner does. Of course, a freeware won't have that much efficiency but I am looking primarily for following features:
1. Windows support.
2. Ease of Use, UI script recording is preferable.
3. Good number of protocol support.
4. Features of load generation and analysis.
5. Scheduler and reporting capability.
6. Community support.
The tools which I have looked into.
1. Jmeter (This is by far the best option, but I need to find an alternative)
2. FunkLoad (Os dependent)
3. Grinder (Only supprts testing for Java APIs)
4. Multi-Mechanize (Works only for linux)
Grinder support is not limited to only Java API, it supports HTTP, SOAP, JDBC, POP3, SMTP, LDAP and JMS.
Another good tool is Gatling.
You can also look into Tsung, it more Linux/Unix oriented but can also be run on Windows via Cygwin
All 3 above offer record-replay capabilities.
I believe that Open Source Load Testing Tools: Which One Should You Use? will be quite helpful in your research.
There are zero open source tools which reproduce the complete functionality of the big commercial tools, LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, Rationa|IBM Performance Tester, Neoload, SOASTA, etc..
If you put the appropriately skilled person behind any performance tool, even the most expensive ones, you will have a positive return on your investment. Choose the wrong user and there is no tool so cheap that you will not have a negative ROI. It is this last condition which drives many organizations to abandon their current tools and move downstream, the people that they have hired sing constant choruses of "blame the tool" when the real reason is "I don't know how to use the tool."
What are the software/ Wiki you use to write and share your specs about the developers, testers and management?
Do you use Wiki system, and if so, what Wiki software you use?
Or do you use Sharepoint to manage and version the specs? One problem with SharePoint 2003 as specs platform is that it's very hard to collaborate among different people.
For backward compatibility sake, I would also like to have the platform able to import Microsoft Word seamlessly. And it would certainly help if the interface is similar to Microsoft Word.
Any idea?
I've used Confluence at a number of places, it's a pretty powerful wiki and very good for creating specifications that can be shared amongst various parties. See:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/
There's some more information here on the advantages of using Confluence:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/170352/confluence-experiences
EDIT: I've updated this to deal with the Microsoft Word import feature you mentioned. Confluence supports this through the Office Connector here:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/office-connector.jsp
There's also a Sharepoint connector:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
plus a whole bunch of plugins:
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/plugins/sharepoint-connector.jsp
Some of these are user contributed also. I can't recommend Confluence enough as a commercial wiki.
I've also used JSPWiki, which is open source. it's ok but not as good as confluence, see:
http://www.jspwiki.org/
You could try Google docs - I have successfully used this in the past. It supports import / export to MS Word, and it has great support for multiple user - see http://www.brighthub.com/internet/google/articles/8236.aspx.
It supports versioning, allows you to chat with other people who are currently working on the document, and shows you a list of all the changes others have made to the document (without needing to close / reopen the document).
If you want corporate support, Google also provides that - see Google Apps for business.
We use SharePoint -- it's not ideal, but it does a decent job. If I were you, I would seriously look at getting off SharePoint 2003 and on to MOSS (SharePoint 2007). It's not perfect, but it's substantially better. Here's a little bit on using MOSS as a wiki. I think in general wiki's are a good tool for getting people up to speed on your system. We used to pass around "getting started documents" and now we have all that type of stuff in our developer portal.
Per John's comment, I looked up this feature comparison. I have to go back and look at what features I'm using that are not in WSS -- I might be paying for licenses I don't need! :)
We use email. I know it isn't elaborate, but it is easy to use. Everyone has it installed and there are no licensing issues. All spec changes are sent to an super set email distro indicating the updates and the location on the network share where the spec can be found.
We use Alfresco, in its Community version, from both its Share and Explorer web interfaces.
Quite useful, with a document library, wiki, forum and calendar.
We curently host about 1.8 Go consisting mainly in docs, versionned and sometimes automatically converted to PDF (by creating an automatic content rule).
FTP, WebDav and network share are also used to access to the same repository.
You could take a look at Microsoft Groove - the collaboration software that Microsoft bought a few years back.
It's bundled free with premium versions of Microsoft Office.
You can customize the workspace with discussion boards and can fairly seamlessly store collaboratively-edited Office documents.
We use MediaWiki for dos & specs. Wiki definitely wins anything like Microsoft Word or SharePoint - it allows you to develop a documentation in "first refer, then describe" = "divide and rule" way. Perfect for developers - they used to think the same way. The process of developing a documentation is almost ideal: you start from TOC and drill down until you write the document for every link you put earlier.
MediaWiki is quite customizable - there are lots of extensions there. The most necessary ones are:
Source code highlighter - CSO_Source
Our own templates integrating wiki with class reference.
Others are InterWiki, FileProtocolLinks, YouTube (we use customized version of it to display HD video), ReCaptcha, SpecialDeleteOldRevisions, Maintenance.
Some integration examples are here.
And we use Google issue tracker to track the issues. Its main advantages:
Imput usability: the process of adding\changing the issue is really convenient there. Earlier we tried Track Studio - the same actions require 2-3 times more time there, so it died fast simply because most of us hated to use it.
Customizable grids. See the examples. Really helpful.
Atom\RSS support. So everyone knows what's going on.
There is a Gurtle tool integrating it with TortoiseSVN. Really helpful.
Its main disadvantage is that it can't be closed from the public access. This makes it simply unusable in many cases.
If you want a UI similar to Word, why not use Word with SharePoint 2007? You're on 2003 so the experience is there. Upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and you can have the collaboration, Word features, document sharing, and so on.
This is the kind of thing Microsoft wants people to use Office for, so there's a ton of doco out there about how to configure your SharePoint and Office environment to support collaboration.
There is something that Google do in this direction and it looks really cool: wave.google.com. It would be a great step in collaboration and worth to wait it.
Here we use Google Docs it makes the documents available to everyone write or read only, public or private among people that have or not Google accounts, it also can import Word docs, not to mention that it runs directly into the browser so it has high availability with zero cost and zero setup, also its computer/OS agnostic, we have a nice experience with it.
Also perhaps you should take a look at Basecamp or Backpack at 37Signals, any of then might also fit your bill.
We use DocBook for all of our specifications (and other customer-facing documentation). DocBook is an XML format that lets you easily generate documents in just about any format, including PDF, which is how we distribute things to clients to get them signed off. We can divide a document into files (by section) and commit everything to our source control system (Subversion). Because it is all XML (i.e. text-based), Subversion's automatic merging and conflict resolution works great if two people work on the same file. We have a set of stylesheets that all of our documents use, so all documents share the exact same style/format, with no extra work on our part.
And if you don't like editing XML files directly, there are GUI front-ends that provide a reasonably WYSIWYG-like experience. I believe that most people in my office use XMLMind. Still, we happen to all be technical people so if we had to write XML directly it wouldn't be an issue.
As a sidenote, we also put out release notes. We have some XSLT that lets us write documents like this:
<bugs>
<bug id="1234" component="web">JavaScript error when clicking the Kick Me button</bug>
</bugs>
We then have a script that runs through our Subversion repository doing an svn log from the previous release tag to the current release tag, and some Bugzilla integration to automatically generate release notes on-the-fly.
(also, for most internal-only documentation, we use MediaWiki, which is also a great way to collaborate.)
We use OnTime. It was originally only used for defect tracking, but we've started using it to track features as well. These can be used to document the feature as it evolves during development. Features can be grouped together into sprints or releases, and time can be tracked against each feature. If you are using SCRUM, you can also plot burn-down charts for each sprint. It also has wiki functionality.
I'm really excited about this new and experimental language named Subtext. But it's author haven't released nothing about it besides some papers and videos. Should I clone it? There are similar alternatives?
UPDATE I'm looking for an example-driven VPL, not just a VPL.
As Edwards' says in his related work section, the Self programming language is very similar. It shares subtext's emphsis on directness, uniformity, and liveness, but doesn't emphasize a tabular format (Schematic tables).
A lot of of work went into the Solaris version:
http://research.sun.com/self/papers/papers.html
seems there's a Mac & linux version, not sure how mature it is:
http://selflanguage.org/
Here's a video demo'ing Self, where they emphasize directness, uniformity, and liveness:
http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/
When you say "any VPL", do you mean none at all, or not a run-of-the-mill one? From the wording of the title question, I'll assume the latter. Here're a couple with some serious programming theory behind them:
Morphic is/was a/the UI piece of Self, and is now ported to Squeak:
http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2139
Prograph was a way-cool system, but I don't know of an available version.
A bit further out there is Kahn's Toontalk, based on Pictorial Janus:
http://www.toontalk.com/
I am sure you are aware of VPL On Wikipedia that lists many different VPL languages. You have not supplied information on what you are trying to achieve but another site is Synopsis. This is a commercial product.
From their website:
Synopsis is a completely visual RAD tool for Windows that frees you from having to write textual code and learning unnecesary programming details. With Synopsis you can concentrate on creating software instead of wrestling with mundane and complex low-level development tasks.
The image below shows how this application looks:
(source: codemorphis.com)
Granted my knowledge on this subject is limited and I do follow this to see if something really powerful can be created. I did see a project on CodeProject or CodePlex that was written in C# that allowed VPL but I cant find that URL.
If I ever do find that application I will edit this post!
You haven't provided more information about features you expect from such a VPL environment, but I think that "Tersus" could be interesting thing to look at. There're many VPLs, but mainly they're targeted as educational tools or addition to particular technologies (i.e VPL for Microsoft Robotics Studio) to simplify common tasks programming. The "Tersus" is full blown application development platform. It's open source and free to download for many OSes.
http://www.tersus.com
Coherence — The Director’s Cut
The Coherence home page is up at http://coherence-lang.org. The submitted version of the paper is there, with a new intro and a surprise ending.
Coherence claims to be an experimental programming language, a continuation of Subtext using other means.
Intentional shipped, but they are still kind of alpha, with limited distribution and testing. You can make example driven DSLs, but I don't know if the environment itself works that way.
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3287
You could look at the work on eve that is happening too:
http://incidentalcomplexity.com/
I've enjoyed using the iTunes Store but I'm curious on what it was developed on (PHP & MySQL, Something Custom?).
WebObjects. It comes with XCode these days, but used to cost over $50 000! Not sure about the database backend. I seem to recall reading that it was Oracle, but I don't have a source and may have just accidentally made that up.
Joe Nuxoll former apple employee on the java posse pod cast has mentioned that they use web objects.
#Stephen Darlington is correct, it's WebObjects. The WO code generates pure Java, which is further optimized. The code has been rewritten a couple of times.
Interestingly, Dell's original BYO website was written in WebObjects, the $50,000 version back in 1996.
iTunes store is a mix of a lot of technologies, but the main one is Apple's WebObjects. WebObjects is rock solid java framework including a lot of mature technologies (templating, ORM).
WebObjects is free (correct me if i'm wrong), can be installed virtually on every platform and is not restricted on MacOSX.
WebObjects is mainly developped using eclipse and a plugin called WOLips.
There is a very active community behind this framework and the development tools.
Some links :
The official WebObjects community website
The WebObjects/Wonder/Wolips community wiki
yeah its webObjects, also you can use multiple database sources with WO and you can combine other languages with it such as JS and php
In reality webobjects has been overlooked for some time now, mainly because of its past price and that it has not been well marketed by apple
I think whatever answer you get will be 99% speculation. I would bet that if someone really did work for Apple and did have the facts they wouldn't be allowed to share them.