What is the best language and approach to build the widgets website like http://www.pageflakes.com/. By best I mean rapid development, performance, smoothness and by approach I mean that some one will use drag and drop plug in jQuery (some issues) etc.
Two functionality will be main in my site:
selecting the widget and then dragging on the specified position i like
saving the state without login for the user.
You don't mention your existing language skills which might be the most important detail here. Also, are you prepared to learn a new language/framework for this project?
Some generic advice assuming you would be using Java: since the site in consideration looks more like a web application as opposed to a "web site", a framework which supports rich controls/Ajax natively might work wonders here. A GWT based framework like SmartGWT might be an interesting candidate.
Related
I recently started using Xamarin.Forms for a project. Like the documentation mentions, it's great for prototyping. However, I'm really starting to notice limitations of the shared concepts for UI design. In particular, the inability to set custom button content (such as an image) is aggravating. I'm sure there will be several instances where I'll want to change how controls work.
The way I see it, there are two routes I could take. One, continue using Xamarin.Forms and make use of custom renderers. Considering I would still like my UI code to be shared, but also customized from the basic Xamarin.Forms controls, I'm leaning towards this option. Two, use the native Xamarin projects (Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android). This would give me full control over the UI for each platform, but it would also mean more code to maintain.
Like I mentioned, I'm currently favoring the option to use custom renderers with Xamarin.Forms. Could I get some insight from those who have used one or (preferably) both options?
I've mainly used Xamarin.Forms. For the right kinds of apps (ones that are, well, "Forms"-like), it works pretty well.
Writing custom renderers isn't that hard, but the documentation is, unfortunately, not that great. Depending on what you're doing, it can be a bit tricky at times translating between the native control and the Forms layout engine. However once you get the hang of it, it makes sense, and now that the code is open source, you can peek inside to see how the "built-in" controls work.
There are various extensions that add more controls. Some are free and open source, like XLabs.Forms. So the control you need might be out there already.
You can use mechanisms like TapGestureRecognizer to turn an Image or a Label into a button, so just because the built-in Forms Button is really, really lacking in customizability, you can sometimes find other ways to get the same effect and still stay within pure Xamarin.Forms.
Hope that helps!
XamarinForms is good for sample application who don't need to use a lot of specificity of the device.
For complex applications, I advise you to start on Xamarin Ios and Android.
It will take more time to take charge but you will see it is much more permissive
Is there are web framework that allows creating of custom Web UI designers that can be embedded into a webpage/webapp?
What I am looking for is to create a web UI that allows users to edit the UI in a drag and drop style editor. It should be possible to select some widgets (like these: http://scaffy.railsware.com/futurico/#pagination) and to select a data source (will be provided by back-end, nodejs).
Background: I am not a web designer and have no previous web experience. I just want to know if it possible to create what I am looking for and how much effort it would be. My background is in embedded Linux development and I would like to create an easy way for people to create machines with single board computers. The embedded stuff is pretty much complete and I am exploring ways to create nice and user editable user interfaces.
I think what you want is possible.
However... as far I know nothing exists which will do exactly what you require.
There are thousands of UI widgets on the Web to choose from but you would need a custom built backend cms developed especially for your needs
There plenty of Web agencies who could provide a bespoke solution. They could also assist with updates and adding new widgets.
So it can be done (and may encounter some browser incompatability issues), but you'll just have to be prepared to spend money.
I am developing a Java EE based web application. We have a very limited time to come up with a alpha version and trying to decide on a web framework to use. It has to be something easy to learn but powerful. Standard JSP/Servlet is not an option here due to the time it takes for the development. Appreciate if anyone could advice. Current options are Wicket and GWT. (JSF is also an option)
Wicket is component-based and comes with a bunch of standard components (like pagination, auto-complete, data grids, form handling etc.). If you want to create a standard panel (with the possibility for easy re-use) just create your HTML fragment to use a template (with wicket:id attributes wherever you want to bind dynamic content or sub-components) and a corresponding Java file. Furthermore, you can attach specific CSS and JS files.
In my opinion, Wicket development is good value (functionality) for money. And you get a lot of built-in AJAX functionality without even writing (not reading) any JS. E.g., change the model for a component, attach the component to an AjaxRequestTarget and the panel is automagically repainted via DOM manipulation.
For a quick overview and intro I recommend Wicket in Action by Dashorst & Hillenius. (And don't miss out on other great resources.)
Everything depends on your application. I don't have experience with Wicket, not much with JSF. I have big experience with GWT.
GWT is good if your application has to be mostly dynamic. In GWT you can change everything on the page not even calling the server. GWT is compiled to Javascript. On the other hand, if you have big project, it is quite frustrating if your application in development starts few minutes, because it has a lot of code to compile to Javascript. My opinion: it is not good for big projects.
If you don't need to change your pages so much client-side, I would use JSF2 (or Wicket, if I knew it).
Have a look at this comparison of Wicket and GWT, this may help you decide for yourself:
Wicket and GWT compared with code
I'm starting work on a new website (sort of an e-commerce product comparison thing) and I'm trying to choose what technologies to build it on. I've ruled out PHP and I don't think I want to use Python or Ruby. I really like Java and Hibernate so I started looking into Java-based web technologies.
My problem is that all of the documentation and examples I've read can't seem to stop repeating the words "enterprise" and "web applications." I'm afraid of ending up with giant XML configuration files and business-oriented components while losing the ability to actually design the website. From what I've read of JSF, I like the idea of reusable components, but I still want the ability to customize individual pages. So my question is, are JSF/Seam/Spring well-suited for non-enterprise development? If not, what Java technologies are?
I have just started looking into JSF/Seam so please forgive me if this is an uninformed quesiton. Thanks in advance. :)
No problem. The JSF/Seam stack gives you all the customization you want, and it has very few XML files. In fact, it uses a lot of annotations to define entities and components, so you don't have to worry about writing tou much XML (it is one of the reason why Seam was invented).
JSF's standard components are rendered as simple HTML tags, while if you want to go AJAX and use Richfaces it will be a little harder to customize it, but nothing dramatic. I can assure you that for the view part, you can write whatever you want in your webpages.
Here's a nice reference of how the JSF tags are rendered.
For the model and DB part, the JPA framework gives you the ability to work with simple Java Objects, and sometimes using it in an "enterprise" context with legacy schema is even more difficult, so don't worry.
For a simple website you may safely skip the EJB part, this will help you writing a more cleaner project structure. You can package all your website in a simple .WAR file.
As for the "enterprise" word, I think it is more related to the fact that the Java EE framework gives you the feature you may need in an enterprise context, (i.e. EJBs), but you can avoid them.
They don't bite.
Since I don't really have a good idea for word to search with myself I’d like to ask you:
Is there some project, technology, w/e that enables you to build a 'browser' with a very slim ui. Just some CI and a customised "starting page".
I'm thinking of something like the Webkit engine (and interface) Valve/Steam uses for it's clients store page.
In what direction should I search for something like that ? How would one start implement something like that ?
Answers to questions:
We need this to provide something like a "Kiosk" application (for touchscreens) and shippable to our Customers. Running a browser in "full screen" is a temporary solution.
As of Platforms: Windows is absolutely sufficient for now, but Mac/Linux wouldn't hurt.
Prism looks nice so far but lacks the "shippable" part, e.g. I see no way of packaging it.
Take a look at Mozilla Prism. It's a "UI-Less" version of the Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine aimed at deploying web apps on the Desktop. It's also multi-platform. It might be fairly close to what you need, with comparably little work.
WebKit has bindings for many languages, is cross-platform, and is full-featured as a HTML engine. A bit of work capturing signals and calling functions will make it into any kind of web browser you like.
You could use Adobe Air, follow this tutorial and include your website within an iframe. That would allow you to build an executable you can ship to your customer.
Various graphics toolkit libraries contain some components which can display a limited amount of HTML. I've seen this in qt (a C++ GUI library) and in Java Swing, and have indeed built a tiny "browser" in Java within a couple of hours. Java Swing lets you attach a link listener so links can be made clickable and thereby jump to different URLs. Thus, my application could be made to work as a very limited browser.
This approach lets you display text, images and links; in the case of Java, there's even fairly good support for CSS styling. However, there's no simple way to make buttons and form fields work, and of course no support for manipulating the DOM or anything else done in JavaScript.