livecode website templates

[Richard Gaskin]

Matt Maier wrote:

 > Riiiiiiiight...except that I can't use "view page source" to see any
 > Livecode because what's delivered to the browser is either html, css,
 > or javascript, correct? So the Livecode "source" is replaced by its
 > own output, which maintains the mystery.

True.  As with PHP, if you're seeing the code rather than the processed 
output, that means the system didn't work.

And like PHP, one of the reasons you may not see much source for 
complete sites is that many times what people write is purpose built for 
a specific site.

For example I could show you the code I use to produce the output at 
livecodejournal.com, but that setup is so specific to my own particular 
CMS preferences that it would be darn near useless for anyone else (even 
more so in that case since I don't use LC Server at all, so I have extra 
code to handle things like parsing incoming requests that LC Serve does 
automatically).

I'm with Phil on this one:  For a good look at a sophisticated system 
made with LC Server, check out Ralf Bitter's excellent framework, 
RevIgniter:
http://samples.on-rev.com/index.irev


 > There are several small tutorials scattered around, but where can I
 > see actual websites that run on Livecode? Even the on-rev.com
 > examples don't actually provide the *.lc files. All I can see there
 > are the isolated Livecode scripts and the static page delivered to
 > the browser in html.

There are a few examples in the community where the author has the 
output and source available from the same page.  Jacque, didn't you have 
a couple of those?  Anyone here know of others?


 > When you say "use Livecode for the client" do you mean a desktop
 > standalone or the new HTML5 standalone?

As a general rule, I'm big on testing pre-release code but almost never 
ship anything until it goes final (a habit I picked up from the 
SuperCard for Windows days, an old joke that may make some here 
chuckle).  And I need < 6-second page load times.  So while the HTML 
export option seems to be coming along nicely, I don't expect to explore 
production solutions with it for some time.

Meanwhile, standalones are great.  Truly great.  The built-in support 
for HTTP makes so many things super-easy.  Most of the work I'm doing 
now is workgroup solutions in which the app has only enough code to 
download a small library, and that library downloads everything else, 
UI, business logic, media, data, the works.

This gives me most of the benefits that make web deployments useful: 
the client always has the most recent built, data is stored in the cloud 
so they can work from any machine and collaborate with others.

And it avoids the big downside of web development:  I don't have to 
confine my UI and feature set to fit into the constraints of a browser. 
  I can freely work with local files, the only menus in my menu bar are 
the ones my app needs, and I never have to handle the biggest nightmare 
web devs face: what happens when the user hits the Back button? (though 
in all fairness that's been somewhat mitigated by recent new event 
supported added in HTML5).

For me the best thing about using LC on both client and server is being 
able to use compressed LSON for transferring data ("LSON" is a play on 
"JSON" and "BSON", my pet name for LiveCode encoded arrays; I've found 
since I adopted that many client conversations are much simpler; 
everyone loves familiar-sounding acronyms).  Much of the work we do in 
LC is well expressed in arrays, and being able to serialize them for 
transport more simply and efficiently than any JSON library could hope 
to offer has been wonderful.

Many here have reported organizational concerns about standalone 
deployment, and I suppose if stakeholders truly need a web app they need 
a web app.

But many times they don't truly need a web app.  If there's anything 
we've learned from the Mobile Era, is that OS-native apps have a 
valuable role, able to do things far beyond what a browser can do.

For the low cost of a one-time download and installation, an 
organization can enjoy always-fresh code and cloud collaboration 
workflows, all in a UI dedicated to the task at hand.

And when those are built with LiveCode, they enjoy significant cost 
savings as well. :)

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com