Seaside applications with Nori
Last updated at 1:33 am UTC on 17 January 2006
See http://map1.squeakfoundation.org/sm/package/d79985d3-c616-409c-8007-2d3cf2fcb486
Nori is a framework for building Seaside applications using templates
instead of generating HTML programmatically. It grew out of my need to
work with a designer in building consumer-oriented web applications. To
that end, here are some of the features and design goals in Nori:
- maximized separation of the appearance of the UI from it's behaviour. This lets programmers and designers work independently if only appearance or behaviour needs to be changed.
- testability. Nori makes it easy to write unit tests for UI behaviour. These can be used designers to ensure that visual changes don't affect UI behaviour, as well as by programmers doing TDD.
- minimal syntax. Nori templates can be strictly compliant XHTML, which means that they can be manipulated using a variety of external tools. Designers can use WYSIWYG tools to create the templates, and they can be versioned in CVS, stored in XML databases, generated using XSLT or whatever. Also, it's possible to browse the templates directly as a non-interactive mockup of the application.
- integration with Seaside. Nori components can be embedded in Seaside components and vice versa, so all the usual Seaside tools - explorer, profiler, browser, etc - can be used with Nori components as well.
As this is the first release of Nori, it's pretty stable but not
terribly mature. It has good test coverage, and several examples to get new users started. I appreciate any and all feedback.
Colin Putney
