Re: Ruby on Rails Review

On Apr 11, 2006, at 12:12 PM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:

>
> On Apr 11, 2006, at 8:55 PM, Pierce T. Wetter III wrote:
>> Hmmm... #if. Doubt dreamweaver likes that...
>>
>> Personally, I'd like to see something more like HoTMetaL from Zope.
>>
>> All of these break down once you have components though, because  
>> each HTML editor only understands their own component system...
>
> I looked at Dreamweaver markup recently. It has a notion of  
> "component". Each final HTML page contains special HTML comments  
> delineating the original components. Often reusable components  
> created by designer are very close to what a developer would do (UI  
> elements reuse is the goal in both cases).
>
> I don't know if that's a stupid idea, but theoretically it should  
> be possible to sync up between a static Dreamweaver site and a WO  
> (Click, Tapestry, etc.) app using an Ant script or something. If  
> this ever works a designer will never have to touch an application  
> copy, only the static site. Also the actual web technology will  
> have less of an impact as far as synchronization is concerned.
>
> The question is how smart the sync code can be made... it can  
> certainly do an initial import of DW site to an app, but after that  
> the sync becomes much more challenging. So I suspect it will be of  
> limited use. Still I'd like to play with it next time when I get a  
> suitable project (been mostly doing backend-heavy stuff with ugly  
> UI lately).

   Yeah, this has been a dream of mine for awhile...

   The idea would be that we start with a template language that  
looks like pure HTML (http://www.turbogears.org/about/kid.html).

   Then, there would be a mode you could run your app in where it  
would leave in all the template stuff instead of replacing it. That  
is, you could use your app to generate its own sample data.

   So the designer, fires up his browser, goes to the "designer  
version" of your app, saves the source to a file, edits it in  
Dreamweaver/GoLive/whatever, and saves it right back out...

   Or even better, just runs Dreamweaver and your app in parallel...

  Pierce