[Seaside] Front-End developer coordination

[Johan Brichau]

A UX designer/developer (because 'front-end’ is broader) should be able to give you both html and css structure for your pages and components.
If you already have pages and components, he/she should be able to give you the necessary changes in both html and css. They can just use the app’s html from the browser and start from there. You can then apply the necessary changes they design to the Seaside code that produces the html.

I recommend creating Seaside brushes for recurring patterns of html+css or for small components that have no associated state.
With Seaside components and, especially the ability to do subclassing, you can have a very flexible implementation of the UX designer’s work in your Seaside code.

The most difficult problem is the common understanding of what are ‘components’ in the app, such that the UX designer knows what you can have reusable and what he/she should handle as a ‘component’ in the pages.
The best thing to do for that is to develop a component library (exactly like what you can already find in Bootstrap or Material Design) and have that as the common ground between UX design/developer and the Seaside developers.

Of course, I cannot know what kind of assignment or structure your project has, but in my experience, you _will_ need to change the html structure when a designer goes to work with it.
A UX designer can not just create css classes for your existing html structure unless you want to end up with an unmaintainable mess of css definitions.

Mind that this ‘issue’ is not specific to Seaside. The same issue arises if the UX designer/developer is not a fluent Javascript engineer to work with ReactJs.
Sure, there are front-ends that can do all that but it’s more often not the case.

Also: do not put those css files in a WAFileLibrary. Put them in plain text files and have them served by a frontend web server (or Zinc in Pharo).
A good UX developer will use SaSS (or something similar) and generate the css files every time. You do not want to mess with WAFileLibrary in that development workflow...

Cheers
Johan

> On 24 May 2019, at 21:09, BrunoBB <smalltalk at adinet.com.uy> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We are doing a project with Seaside and there is a Front-end developer
> mostly for CSS creation.
> 
> How do you approach this problem (coordination between Seaside developer and
> frontend developer) ?
> 
> I mean in Seaside the HTML code is generated but it has to do some
> references to the CSS created by the frontend developer.
> 
> One approach can be:
> 1) Add css class names (the css does no exist yet) in Seaside code (html div
> class: 'to-be-developed-by-frontend-dev').
> 2) The frontend create the CSS file for classes in 1).
> 
> Very simple but i wonder how do you solved this problem ?
> 
> regards,
> bruno
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Sent from: http://forum.world.st/Seaside-General-f86180.html
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