[Webmacro-devel] What my webapp will offer web designers

[Marc P. <ma...@an...>]

Hi,

As per Lane's recommendation a few days ago, I'm going to start a couple of 
threads detailing what my forthcoming webapp offes designers and java 
devlopers - treating each separately. Sorry for the delay in all this but 
we had a baby 3 weeks ago and I'm "off work" and doing as much as I can to 
help with caring for our new daughter! OK, on to my other baby...

First let's define what I mean by web designer. I mean anybody who hacks 
together websites, whether professional or amateur, but typically not a 
Java programmer.There are literally tens of millions of would-be web 
designers out there - an order of magnitude more than there are "serious" 
java programmers (i.e. people who can write more than a main() method with 
a for loop in it).

For these "web designers" the webapp will offer a single binary download 
that can be installed immediately in any servlet container and template- 
driven pages can be viewed immediately.

After doing this, they can view the webapp's docs which are served via the 
webapp itself using WM, and "context sensitive" help that tells them 
exactly what request parameters and template variables are provided by the 
actions, helpers and plugins.

They can immediately edit the demo templates and instantly see the changes 
in their browser by hitting Refresh. At this point they already have a 
powerful content system - server side includes, loops, variable passing, 
macros, session vars and so on.

Then they can learn about the more advanced features - helpers, plugins and 
actions - after which they can download these classes from websites, most 
likely webmacro.org, that add more advanced functionality.

Built in to the binary deployment should be some of the most common 
advanced facilities:

* Sending e-mail
* Logging clicks to links
* User login/authentication
* Storage/retrieval of field data by "view id", an arbitrary grouping 
mechanism that spans actions and pages.
* Useful helpers - file system access, date manipulation, simple XML DOM 
access (for RSS display for example)

So, as far as web developers are concerned that's it pretty much. It seems 
simple, and it is really. That's the beauty of it, I think.

I'll try to post about the developer side of it tomorrow.

Marc
-- 
Marc Palmer
http://www.wangjammers.org