For discussion...
I was talking about with a colleague the other day, the single biggest
problem with replacing traditional client/server apps, is the lack of a
unified front end UI library. Rails is absolutely fantastic and a breath of
fresh air, for doing back end work and AJAX. RJS rocks for transforming HTML
elements, but one of the big stumbling blocks will be how do I simply, drop
a consistently styled nav bar, tree grid etc etc on the page. ie I''m a
web
application developer, I don''t want to, or need to concern myself with
styling/writing front end "controls". Now I know this is not what
Rails is
about, nor am I asking for Rails to have ''this'' in it. But
there seems
somewhat of a natural progression here...
One thing my discussion buddy just pointed out to me, and that I''ve
seen in
the past is Backbase (http://www.backbase.com), now this is a commercial
product, and therefore not part of the whole Rails / Prototype/Scriptaculous
ecosystem. But what it does have is a very nice browser based UI
library.>From the 5-10min look at it I''ve had, it seems to have a Javascript
rendering engine, that if supplied various tagged elements in the backbase
format, will go and generate controls etc with on the fly. Which kinda looks
like Flex (Flex is very hot, and if it weren''t for the astronomical
licensing fees last time I looked....), but in Javascript vs Flash. Again
from the very brief look at it I''ve had, this looks very very nice (and
quite possibly well worth the money if I were to use it commercially), and
I''m about to start investigating using the client side of it with
Rails, to
see how easy/complete it really is. Given the licenseing fees really
aren''t
that big it''s almost a no brainer if it does the job well.
There also is these other libraries/frameworks out there around. Dojo,
Yahoos little library, Qooxdoo etc But none have the completeness (yet) of
Backbase - qooxdoo does look veeery interesting thought. However any of the
options above feel, just somehow, well wrong. Because they''ll be tacked
on
to Rails, whereas they should be part of the whole ecosystem.
What I''m wondering if anyone is having the same thoughts, or
investigating
extending Prototype/Scriptaculous into a competing arena. It certainly seems
to me, what would be the finishing touch in the Rails ecosystem, for web
applications (not confusing with styled/branded web sites, I''m talking
about
replacements for desktop apps here...). OR am I missing something here, and
is something already underway out there ?
And has anyone succesfully used the previously mentioned UI frameworks, in
an app, with Rails. (even though, yes, it doesn''t really matter what
backend
you have to these frameworks)
?
Cheers
Rowan
----
http://raili.st
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