Recently I've been playing around with different frameworks and libraries, looking for something that really suits my needs.
You see, my job mainly involves creating asp.net mvc applications and for most of them using Razor and a little bit of jQuery is enough. But in certain cases and only for a few pages,which are rarely more than one or two per app, I really need something extra that helps me avoid getting entangled in a bunch of jQuery code.
As I mentioned, I tried a couple of alternatives and from them, the one I liked the most is Aurelia, because of its simplicity and the fact that it embraces standards, BUT the more I dive into the framework, the more I think that it might not be what I'm looking for,as it seems more suitable for full spa applications and what I need is:
Something that helps me reduce the amount of DOM manipulation
A efficient templating engine
I know that Aurelia provides that and much more, but I don't want/need a SPA, I need those functionalities ONLY in some specific pages and not the whole application.
Can Aurelia help me achieve this? If so, how?
Sure, Aurelia can help you achieve that. You just won't use certain features like routing in on the pages you create with Aurelia.
That being said, it isn't a drop in replacement for jQuery, but none of the "modern" JS frameworks really are. And you're going to end up spending time learning whichever one you end up choosing.
Check out the aurelia.enhance functionality, it might be just what you're looking for!
I have used Aurelia in a non-SPA context, and it worked out well. I think this is exactly what you describe. For example:
http://legumeinfo.org/chado_phylotree/phytozome_10_2.59028020
https://github.com/legumeinfo/tripal_phylotree/tree/lis_master/theme/js/aurelia
I'm using aurelia for dynamic elements on some sites. Like comments for example. Page loads fast w/o comments.Then Aurelia kicks in and loads the comments below. Also with some signalR magic the discussion is updated in real time. It is awesome and insanely easy.
I was put in charge of learning this and well I have read and tried to understand it all. I am lost in how to get it started and optimized. I need to achieve a window at startup that is menu based and takes you to different components. I think I have the photo galleries sorted out just now sure how to link to the startup window.
examples
I used this tutorial when I was trying to learn - http://miamicoder.com/2011/writing-a-sencha-touch-mvc-application/
The learning curve is quite steep but once you understand it it's a really good bit of kit to know your way around.
If you don't already understand the MVC (Model View Controller) architecture then it's going to be a bit tricky but the tutorial explains it all pretty well.
My advice would be start following the tutorial. Stick to it, get it working and THEN adapt it.
Good luck.
With Sencha Touch 2, the team have created a bunch of guides which hopefully help ease the pain when trying to learn the framework.
I suggest you first take a look at the Getting Started Guide, and then move onto the Building your first App Guide. These both should give you a kick start on where to start.
After that, I would definitely recommend you take a look at the code of their various examples, and then try modifying it. When I was first learning the framework (and JavaScript in general) I found that taking existing code and modifying it was definitely the easiest way of learning. Obviously this varies from person-to-person, but it is always a good step.
Much of their documentation have previews and examples which you can actually edit the code inline, which I have found very useful in the past. You can view an example of this here.
The Touch Forums are very active. Almost all topics get responded to within hours, and I have never seen a post which was never responded to.
Is OpenSwing a good framework for developing professional desktop application?
I was recently using the OpenSwing Framework. I can say only the best for the functionalities which are provided with the framework. It is a multitier concept with excelent data binding possibilities. My App uses a small Derby DB in background and I’m managing it with hibernate.
I’m sure, you will be able to advance very fast and provide a working prototype very quick. I would advice you to read the available doc first and to run the provided examples (http://oswing.sourceforge.net/).
However, it has another side which you should be aware of and you will probably notice by yourself if you run the examples. The GridFrame, GridFrameControler, DetailFrame, DetailFrameControler etc classes are not really generic. There are a lot of dependencies bult in and you will have to customize them again and again for every single implementation (can be seen in the demos).
I had another approach, I invested some time in building my own classes which are generic and using the unchanged OpenSwing classes in the background first. Now I’m only setting the properties file where all details are pre-defined. The rest is generic and I don’t have to re-code again and again for every single frame.
I hope this will help.
Regards
I used the openswing in team for more than two years.
It's a pretty nice swing framework for the enterprise development used in the Internal.
It provide great component based by MVP pattern ,such as grid , document ...
If you try it , It's a good article for you about Model-View-Presenter
And try the demo in the source,It's quite good.
The JAllInOne is also a good demo for the framework also made by the mcarniel
and It's a personal project only developed by mcarniel. Thanks mcarniel's great work.
Can anyone point me to any self-contained, complete, current reference materials/projects using NHibernate in an ASP.NET MVC2 application?
I have looked at Sharp Architecture, but I am not sure I need the complexity in that project. I certainly don't know enough about it to know if it is over-engineered for my purposes.
I would like to see more types of implementations to gauge the various ways people have skinned this cat.
This video series on nHibernate is great and they are using MVC Storefront as the base for the work:
http://www.tekpub.com/production/nhibernate
Code is here:
http://github.com/robconery/Kona
Another great MVC Resource (if you need one) is their MVC Videos:
http://www.tekpub.com/production/aspmvc
and
http://www.tekpub.com/production/byob
I can't recommend them enough.
Max Schilling
Gave it to Max for just answering. :)
But, for the record, here's additional apps to consider, should you end up here:
Sharp Architecture (the Northwind app
is okay but lean, not typical
enterprisey stuff)
Who Can Help Me? (great stuff and
kept up-to-date)
FubuMVC has good sample apps (based
on MVC not MVC2 at the time of this
post)
Thanks.
I spend a lot of time (actually too much time) developping back-office applications whose main purpose is content management and web application configurations. Here is how I can describe these apps :
- Made with PHP
- Using a MySQL or Postgres or SQLite database
- Made of a lot of pages and features
- Very simple features, mostly data CRUD (create+read+update+delete into the database)
- Mostly made of forms
- UIs are usually quite simple (html + css + very basic javascript)
All of the data access code in these apps relies on a library I developped years ago and re-use every time I can. This part is not time-consuming.
What's time-consuming is the UI part, and mostly designing data-lists and forms. Using a WYSIWYG editor would make a lot of sense here, except those I tried (Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Expression, Eclipse, ...) don't really make it much faster, because the generated code is often bloated, and these tools can't rely on custom libraries such as the one I made and use.
I figured using a Web Tookit could be another way to spend less time developping these tools. So before I spend too much time looking for the perfect toolkit, I would appreciate your opinions and experiences on that kind of matter.
Disclaimer : I'm not looking for advices on how MVC is the way to go and how CodeIgniter/Zend/WhatEver is the framework I should use. My question is not about the frameworks or the design patterns I should build my applications upon. My question is about using the right tool to make simple web-applications development faster, and their code even more re-usable.
Is there an awesome web-application RAD tool I don't know about ?
Which toolkit do you use for simple but form-heavy web applications ?
Are there good, light, non-bloated, reliable toolkits written in PHP ?
Thanks in advance !
Edit : Not getting much feedback so far :/ I'm aware that my question is very broad, but I'm sure lots of people work on the same kind of projects I'm talking about, and have improved their productivity by using toolkits such as GWT, Wicket and such. Tell me about it, please :)
September 28 edit : Thanks everyone for the interesting answers. What I'm looking for is not covered by any framework I could try in the past months. PHP is probably not the best language to use for my vision of RAD, but since it's a language I know very well, and since I don't want to spend too much time learning Python as well as I know PHP (for the moment), I decided to do it by myself. Everytime I have a specific need for a widget, I code it in the most re-usable way...so far so good :)
I might open-source that toolkit at some point, and will let you guys know.
The PHP project I've been working on the past few years is a lot like that. Heavy on forms, heavy on server-side logic, but lots of redundant form coding. Too make matters worse, it wasn't all forms, sometimes we actually need to do fancy layout (even just doing a tree control is a pain without a library), and the home-grown nature of the UI meant that I would be battling browser quirks from start to finish.
So, I got to thinking about what a better architecture would be. We needed very powerful form controls, rich grids, rich trees, advanced layout, and we needed to migrate to that gradually. None of the PHP frameworks seemed to fit. Then I took a step back and realized that it didn't have to be PHP, it could be javascript also. We already had a requirement on javascript, so it was fine to go the distance with it. First I looked at the smaller libraries, jquery, prototype, but it became obvious that they didn't do enough. So I looked at Dojo, ExtJS, YUI, all the really heavy javascript toolkits, and settled on ExtJS as having the best controls.
We had a UI structure that relied heavily on iframes, a navigation frame on the outside, application frames inside that, feature frames inside that, and so on. What we ended up with is we're migrating those from the outside in. It's all becoming ExtJS, and it's all living in the same page. The server-side code is kept the same, but it's migrated into web services. At the same time we've integrated zend framework, and are porting some of the stuff you really shouldn't do home-grown to it, like authentication and translation.
The end goal is being able to write just the business logic without having to mess with all the boilerplate. It's too early to know if my approach will pan out, but I think my message would be to be critical towards your code base and decide which parts you want to keep writing yourself, and which parts you want to outsource to a library.
Please try http://agiletoolkit.org/. I think it's what you need. Results with minimum time/code.
At the moment I'm using a solid forms class to render HTML forms with client- and server-side validation, and a database class to write the SQL. I can get a CRUD section of my admin console up in about 10 lines of code. I wrote those classes myself so I can re-use them in all my projects. Hopefully that gives you some ideas?
I would stay away from WYSIWYG tools personally.
I'm testing NuBuilder.com, I discovered it does
within days, at first looks promising. If you take a look
please send me your feedbacks!
Maybe adopt or create an "app-based" infrastructure like Django's? In Django's case, the community has created some powerful baselines like Pinax.
I think Symfony may be the way to go because, like your apps:
it's written in PHP
ORM based on Propel/doctrine (so you can use MySQL, Postgres or SQLite)
Architecture and patterns used will help you with complex applicatons
You'll find tools helping you to debug, document, and test your application
Forms creation, validation, l10n & i18n, testing, AJAX is easy (forms within symfony explained here, check it out)
prototyping you webpages while developing your application is easy
Other tools/practices implemented in the symfony framework that will make your life easy:
full configuration using YAML syntax (easy to read and understand)
the scaffolding feature generates for you a simple CRUD interface for editing your data.
you don't have to worry about coding form sanitization, security, caching, ACL; configuration is needed, but no heavy coding.
The only downside, you need to read some documentation to understand "the symfony way of doing things". But hey, a good framework is 20% code and 80% good practices.
My point is, even if you don't want to use Symfony for your project, you should check its features and built-in tools, because that's the kind of tools you want for your project.
I started using Django and it has very helpful features, esp. the built-in admin (for general CRUD stuff) and really great form-handling code & widget rendering. I'd suggest taking a look, even if you don't plan on using python, just to get an idea.
You mentioned that you don't want advice on "Use X framework", since this is more about RAD & UI/forms than system architecture. But I've found that a good framework helps just as much with the UI & forms side of things as it does the architecture. That means that while frameworks are great for big projects, they're also very helpful in reducing code redundancy. I started creating my own helper functions in PHP that I would copy from app to app that would automatically render an HTML form based on a few parameters. Even after a lot of work, this was very rudimentary compared to what Django offers, and basically I was writing my own framework.
I think you may be looking for a GUI-style tool to help, but you might find that a good PHP framework is more helpful in this case. At the very least, have you tried creating your own helper libraries? I know those helped me a lot.
Simple Example:
function renderInput($name, $value="") {
print "<input type=\"input\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($value) . "\" >";
}
function renderRadios($name, $value="", $choices=array()) {
for ($choices as $cvalue) {
print "<input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"" . htmlentities($name) . "\" value=\"" . htmlentities($cvalue) . "\" " . ($cvalue == $value ? "checked" : "") . ">";
}
}
And build up from there. Stupid things like this tend to make form creation just that much faster. A good framework will blow this out of the water. And I'm sure the above has some typos, I haven't done PHP in a little bit.
If this isn't what you're looking for, could you add some more to the question? I'm curious.
Although you're asking for PHP + MySql, I would like to recommend you to give a try to the OutSystems Agile Platform.
You can create a simple CRUD app in less that 10 minutes and grow it as you go to a more complex system.
Download the Community Edition for free at www.outsystems.com.
Best,
Not sure but looks like Tibco General Interface (http://www.generalinterface.org ) is what your looking for.