[erlang-questions] newbie web-development advice / guidance

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 08/03/2011 10:35 PM, Rapsey wrote:
> Yeah I never liked nitrogen records either. I don't know how others
> build sites, but at my company the client side steps are always:
> photoshop file  -> create html/css -> convert to templates and write
> javascript

Same here and everywhere I worked, whichever the language. In fact I
wouldn't recommend doing otherwise for any sizeable project. There's
people who know their photoshop, others who know their HTML/CSS/JS, so
it's definitely worth using their skills directly.

There's in fact many other reasons that make building the interface
directly in HTML/CSS/JS worthwhile. But I guess I also see the appeal in
people wanting to link client and server-side code to build complicated
interfaces. I do not know Nitrogen enough to cast a judgement on it, though.

One thing to keep in mind however, if you go the HTML/CSS/JS route, is
that the URIs you use for serving your HTML can also serve JSON for the
AJAX calls and also serve as a public API for your website, all in one
without much extra code required.

> Using django templates makes complete sense when you're starting from an
> html file. It does not take that much work at all and requires very
> little programming knowledge. If you change anything, it's not difficult
> to put the changes in the template, because they are so similar.
> If we used nitrogen, it would take significantly more work and the
> person doing it, would need to learn something completely unnatural if
> he did not know erlang already.

Django is simple enough that the HTML/CSS people can make their own
changes directly in the templates without breaking anything (or not too
often at least).

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
Dev:Extend