Show HN: Front-end framework optimized for internal apps • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Front-end framework optimized for internal apps

#91

Post by akx » Sat, Dec 06, 2014, 3:51 PM UTC

xanderstrike wrote: post #45

teknologist wrote: post #39

I feel internal business applications can be visually appealing too. People have to look at these things all day, so why are we so quick to assert that these people are practically robots who can't appreciate comfortable interfaces when we design and build boring apps? Life can look good all over. Don't succumb to this "business is serious and should therefore be dull and boring" stuff.

I think they're going for a different kind of boring than what you're implying. It doesn't have fancy animations and flashy colors like Bootstrap and Foundation. It's simple, clean, fast and straight to the point, which is something valuable in an internal tool.

Bootstrap doesn't have animations, not that I know of, and I think its colors (though kind of cliché by now) convey information pretty well.

Re: Show HN: Front-end framework optimized for internal apps

#92

Post by firefoxNX11 » Sun, Dec 07, 2014, 1:59 PM UTC

alongnion wrote: post #66

I prefer something more feature-rich, using a known framework like Bootstrap. There's a lot more features and examples built in to inexpensive templates for Admin interfaces like SmartAdmin - https://bootstraphunter.com/smartadmin-product.php

Great point. From perspective of someone deciding between using bootstrap themes vs flakes the decision would be based on whether you want bootstrap or not. What I don't get is why would you NOT use bootstrap or material design and pick something like getflakes? The justification that it's for internal apps - apps which don't have proper budget allocations, need to be done quickly with usability short cuts? I guess that does happen a lot for internal apps. But why would you not build getflakes using bootstrap or foundation?

Re: Show HN: Front-end framework optimized for internal apps

#93

Post by scottschulthess » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 2:27 PM UTC

josekpaul wrote: post #10

I really like gridforms for dense data-entry forms ( http://kumailht.com/gridforms/ ).

"With grid forms, lengthy forms can easily fit above the fold. Which means less scrolling. "

Seems like a bad idea to me whenever designs attempt to "Fit stuff above the fold". Scrolling is a lot better, and I think it's better to present users with a portion of the information at a time and allow them to progress through a long form in a linear fashion. Vertical scrolling > horizontal progression.

Re: Show HN: Front-end framework optimized for internal apps

#94

Post by infinite_snoop » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:00 PM UTC

ivansavz wrote: post #12

What about OpenUI5 for business apps: https://openui5.hana.ondemand.com/#content/Controls/index.ht... From my initial tests, it's very clean MVC (a bit verbose). Also the deploy story is not too good... (frontend code ships as a .war). Does anyone have experience with this, good or bad?

I'm doing a lot of SAP/OpenUI5 development at the moment and performance seems good. I believe the .war is only needed as a one off if you need to deploy the UI5 libs to a Java server? I'm deploying to SAP systems which already host the libraries so I haven't had that issue. One click deploying from Eclipse is built into the UI5 plugin.

UI5 obviously has the weight of SAP behind it (be that for good or bad!) and new releases seem pretty frequent. For developing web apps to consume SAP data at least it seems the obvious choice (it's very much geared towards consuming oData which SAP Gateway provides).