GUI Design and Web Development (Developer Tangent Thoughts) #
When designing the programming course, one of the things that we wanted to be able to do is give our students the ability to design Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) without having to dig into a very complicated area of development.
As an example, It took me 8 hours just to get a simple GUI with an input Field working after 2 months of learning Java in University. The same task took me 15 minutes in a language called Racket.
We wanted to find a compromise between these two systems so that we can help you build the skills neccessary to understand how user interaction on a computer actually occurs without having to teach you Object Oriented Programming and how to create GUIs within those systems.
To futher complicate matters, there are also tools such as the Windows Forms Designer that allow you to drag and drop items onto a canvas and quickly design and modify a GUI for a windows program. Everything is great until you actually have to understand how to make the buttons work and more importantly what the automatically generated code is actually doing and how to fix inevitable errors that come up when you delete a component. Suddenly the Windows Forms Designer cannot open the interface until you have fixed the code.
Clojure was an ideal pick of a language for introducing algorithmic design while providing industry quality tools as well as integration that could enable a lot of practical programs in a short amount of time. But it was not without compromises since one of the challanges with Clojure is that it does not have its own GUI system, it just allows you to use any of the many possible JAVA GUI frameworks.
Overall the thing to understand is that GUI Frameworks Predominently suck. Many major programs will go outside of these frameworks and build their own systems… In short the concepts of abstration only take you so far when there are not enough developers willing to create quality systems that can form standards.
The other interesting thing about GUI design is that most of the actual progress that has been made over the last decade or so has been on the web development side with most of the interfaces for programs now needing to have a website.
Frameworks such as Electron have become popular as well which let you build all of your desktop application using web development tools rather than traditional desktop tools. In fact VS Code that we have been using for development is actually running on Electron.
So to kill a couple of birds with one stone we have found a way to introduce you to GUI development as well as Web Development with one system. That System is called Clojure Electric and it has been released in the last year. It is very cutting-edge and many companies are already starting to use it. It is in what is called an “alpha state” but it is stable enough that we can use it to provide a solid foundation that will help you learn what you need to know and skip all the things that you do not need to know.
After this you will be well equipped if you want to go and learn how to use other GUI frameworks or if you want to go and learn more items to client server architectures and how the web works. for now though we will be able to use what we have learned and create a fully fleged web application without having to worry about details that have nothing to do with the program we are trying to create and everything to do with the structure underneath that we need to deal with in order to create the program.
On Static Sites and Generators #
If you use a website creator tool, you can create a website in 15 minutes. We can’t compete with that. There are many systems that you can pay a subscription fee to each month that will allow you to create a website using predefined templates and you can toss up a website in short order. This is a training course however and so we want to equip you to have actual skills. No body is particularily impressed with someone who can put up a word press site. It is important that you know we are taking a slightly longer path, but it is a better path and you will learn more as you progress through it.
There is also a big difference between a static site (like the one you are reading this on) and a dynamic site like the type we are about to build. If you think about a social networking site like facebook or instagram, you can think of a web application, If you think about it you are constantly interacting back and forth with the application servers which are interaction with the friends that you are communiating with and keep the chat history between all the clients synchronized. that is a whole other set of problems compared to simply putting a blog article or a restaurant menu up on a website. With the Clojure Electric System we can actually build a chat like system with relatively very little code. In fact you can go to https://electric-examples-app.fly.dev/(electric-tutorial.demo-chat!%43hat)/ to see one in action. In less than an hour we could toss something like this up and have a working chat system would could between our friends if we wanted to.