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I'm evaluating DotNetNuke for a project in which an offshore team is going to be doing the development. In short, the application will be a community blogging platform with many similarities to stackoverflow except no questions, just posts. Posts may include an image or video, tags, use info, title, body, community vote (up or down) comments, hotness, and a few other details. They should be taggable, sortable, categorizeable (beyond what a single set of tags provide) In the future the site will carry forums, a calendar, and a couple of other features for which there are modules available for DotNetNuke. Additionally, this site will incorporate a user experience that will include a lot of custom skinning.
Thoughts?
Using a web application framework (such as DotNetNuke) has a ton of benefits to help you get up and running faster and do less work when creating custom functionality.
However, you have to realize that you're basically incorporating tons of code into your project that you may not be familiar with. No matter how good the code is and how easy the framework is to learn, there's still going to be a significant learning curve for you and your team.
Your decision making process (if you're still deciding whether or not to use DotNetNuke), should include (in addition to reading, talking and other general investigation):
Downloading the application from Codeplex and checking out the source.
Investigating the third party modules that are out there.
Downloading a free module or two that comes with source, and try to reverse engineer the creator's development process. How did she integrate with the framework, what features did she take advantage of, what was written from scratch?
One place where DotNetNuke (or any other framework with tons of extensions) available can really shine is taking existing extensions that are available and customize them. If you need to implement a given feature, check out the solutions in the third party extension community first. You can probably find one that gets you a good percentage of the way there and use it as a foundation for your feature.
For example, if you want a photo gallery on your site, you probably don't want to write it from scratch. There are three major photo galleries out there that sell the source code. The core gallery module is free, simple gallery is cheap, and the source for ultra media gallery is available for a reasonable amount compared to writing it yourself. Any of these could give you a good head start in implementing your features.
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I've been assigned to a legacy project which runs on Ext JS 4.2. I know JavaScript but I'm totally unaware of Ext JS and I'm having trouble in understanding it. Can someone please guide me on how to learn Ext JS, what approach should be followed and the important topics to be covered? Or what sequence should be followed?
I have been using ExtJS (7.2.0) in a corporate project for six months, these are some tips I would have needed some time ago.
You should start from the official docs and examples given by Sencha:
guide --> the main topics are The Class Systems, MVC Application Architecture and Components, which are the basis of ExtJS;
examples --> I find the KitchenSink example very useful, since you can briefly overview all the components available in the system - you can also give a look to MVC examples, in order to see more complex architectures;
forum --> you can also check out the Sencha forum, which has many interesting topics (many more that you can find here on Stack Overflow).
Since you are using an older version of ExtJS, you will find many materials on the internet, because it was widely used several years ago, while now it is difficult to find updated sources.
You can check out Saki website or fiddle explorer sorting by created date ASC:
I used to be a trainer for Sencha, and I left the company in 2013 right around the time when ExtJS 4.2 was the main version.
The fastest way to get up to speed on the framework is to take a training class from Sencha. I haven't worked for Sencha for 8 years, and many of my colleagues (who I respected highly as trainers) aren't there any more, so this is not a plug for their services, but it's the fastest way. You will learn shortcuts that will take you much longer if you were to do it yourself. The framework is huge an complicated, and it's nice to get an overview of how it works from an experienced guide.
Before I was hired as a trainer, I took both the ExtJS and Sencha Touch classes that they had available, and the difference between the "before" and "after" in my understanding was huge. Yes, it's a week of your time, and yes, it's $2500, so your manager may not agree with my recommendation, but like I said, it's the fastest way to get up to speed.
If you do decide to take the class, spend some time with your legacy app and write down where you're getting stuck, and ask those questions in class. Part of the class value is that you can get some free light consulting for any issues you may be having.
The fact that you know Javascript is a big plus. I've had people in my classes who were new to Javascript, and that was another hurdle that they had to get over.
Good luck with your app!
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Low code is getting somehow much attention recently, and I am looking for hard, fact-based decision criteria for which platform to choose for which purpose or industry.
I found a flow chart at stackify compiled by Ben Putano in 2017 which is a step in the right direction:
The chart references only Appian, outsystems, kony, mendix, agile point, caspio, salesforce, PowerBI, but does not talk about platforms like. LabView, UiPath, Pega, Camunda, Blue Prism.
I would appreciate some theoretical, scientific input on the whole story of low-code and how to classify the different platforms.
We've built no-code platforms classification based on these 4 questions:
What are the skills your team is good at? (Sales, design, product management, programming, etc).
What is your app front-end? (Responsive web app, native mobile app, static website, API, chatbot, etc).
Type of app you want to build? (Dashboard, directory, marketplace, communication app, community, social network, CRM/ERP, etc).
Do you plan to accept payments? (Yes/No).
We use this classification in our no-code tools advisor service: https://www.nocodesetup.com
Based on its performance, we see that ~80% of people finish such survey to get a personalized recommendation about the right no-code tools to build their app.
To choose the right low-code/no-code platform, other questions might be very useful too. But the more questions you add, the more chances people will get stuck answering them.
Another great example of no-code platforms classification by Aron Korenblit (Head of education at airtable.com): http://read.aatt.io/issues/no-code-is-not-a-monolith-207566
Hope this will be useful.
It's much more complex than this, I believe.
There are so many platforms equally capable of getting you the results you need. A thorough evaluation is still needed. At the low-code company I work at, we felt this as a common pain point for lots of prospects - evaluating low-code vendors, which made us create this scorecard where you can assess ANY low-code/no-code vendor to find the best fit for your use case.
You can use the tool to find which platform is the right fit!
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Goal: I want to create a website for my High School's Soccer team to show game info, player info, and historical stats/records for as little $ as possible.
I originally planned on writing an ASP.NET site, so I spent some time setting up and loading all the data into MS SQL. However, I've realized I'd rather find a simpler solution than me trying to come up with everything that goes with creating/maintaining the site.
The biggest factor here is tying the database to the site. I want to continue to update the data going forward without messing with the front end too much. I've developed in ASP.NET/C#/VB.NET and am comfortable with CSS/web dev/blogging, so I'm able to do a little dirty work if need be.
Question: Is there a good CMS option for my situation? Also, where to host it on the cheap?
I was a CMS developer for 5 years. Having been through all that, I wouldn't write my own for a single, relatively simple site.
There's SO many options out there. Obviously, the standard Joomla/Wordpress/Drupal solutions are there and are SO cost effective to build. Free software + $5 a month hosting (my personal fav is HostGator) and you've got yourself a very good site. Joomla offers some plugins such as calendars, groups and authorization, etc that makes it ideal for a club or sports team setting. Joomla even has free plugins that are specifically made for tracking sports stats and results. I did sports stats on websites professionally for the US Swimming and Cycling teams as well as two NCAA conferences.....and they aren't fun to deal with at all!
That being said, none of those are .net based!
DotNetNuke is where everyone on the .net side seems to turn. This is my personal feeling, but DotNetNuke and Wordpress both fail in that they are somewhat strict with layouts unless you really know what you're doing. For example, look at a bunch of sites and chances are you'll be able to tell which ones are Wordpress based. That was always my top measure of flexibility.
I'm intrigued right now by Concrete5 because of its ability to content manage any layout with minimal modification. Again, it's PHP based. My personal feeling is that you'd actually come out ahead "switching sides" because of the considerable amount of work product and community that the big free CMS packages offer. Setup is a breeze, so knowledge is less of an issue. But ultimately your comfort zone is what matters.
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Are there any standard or "best practice" ways of limiting feature functionality for a particular application?
Example: We have a product with a variety of features, and our customers can pick and choose which features they would like to use, and the cost of the product varies based on which features they are actually using.
In the past, we have distributed along with our software installer an encrypted license file that contains information about the customer, as well as the collection of features that they have enabled. In code, we read from the license file and enable the functionality according to the license file.
This seems to work fine, except there a few disadvantages:
Upgrading users with new functionality can be sort of a pain
If a particular feature shows up in multiple places throughout the application, a developer might not realize that this feature should be licensed, and forget to check the license file before granting functionality to the user
If the license file becomes corrupted, deleted, moved, renamed, etc. the application will not run
We're getting ready to roll out a new set of features, and I was just curious what others in the community have done to tackle this problem?
Why not break down the product into modules like Matlab? Then charge for each module. The licensing can be kept online and the end user just needs to download the module to enable the feature.
There are usually 3 common approaches to this:
using fixed program versions (each version just adds features, you can't customize which features you want or not). You can use also "subversion", like basic and pro edition for Software x.0. Windows uses this approach.
Having modules of functionality, which are a product as themselves. Matlab uses this approach.
Having a software with basic functionality, and then having plugins, or extra apps for sale. Eclipse uses this approach (though it's free)
You can mix those approaches also for a better customizability.
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I'm almost finished working on a useful (at least, in my opinion) JavaScript plugin. Having seen and used many JavaScript packages, both freely licensed (JQuery, YUI, etc) and partly or fully commercially licensed I'm not sure what other factors dictate which license I should release my own under and how to support the plugin.
Some background information on my JavaScript plugin:
Similar audience and plugin size/impact to addthis.com, although slightly more niche. My plugin doesn't provide any analytics though.
Uses JQueryUI for user interface, can be expanded upon with there themeing components, etc.
No other similar tool out there (at least that has become popular).
Can be easily integrated in to a website.
Questions I have:
Should I launch a dedicated website for the plugin, or use something similar to Google Groups? Would a dedicated website bring more kudos perhaps?
Would a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license be a suitable license considering I'm a young developer and perhaps reputation building is more important than my bank managers happiness?
These are the 2 big questions that have been puzzling me for a while now, and I don't know anyone who has been in a similar situation :(
Thanks for any advice.
Considering you seem community, rather than cash driven .. the community will hold the key to what they find best, simplest and acceptable (and what works)
What do other plugin developers do? Take their lead. They set the convention and it determines how other people find your plugin. If a Firefox extension only had it's own site then I probably wouldn't find it.
What do others use? GPL? LGPL? What does jQuery use? Ask them why?
It might be worth using an online revision control tool like github or launchpad so people can contribute bug reports and help your development.
If I were you I would definitely use something like launchpad or google code.
You get integrated (community enabled):
source version control
bug tracking
...
for free.
Considering this library is aimed at other (web) developers a shiny website seems a lot less important then the convenient features above (in a known format).
And: congratulations on your first release, of course ;-)
About running site:
For me running dedicated website gives your product more professional look. Hosting on Google groups isn't good choice for all products: you can't build screenshots gallery, own blog, etc. You can build forum by youself if you need it.