Looking for an application UI template
Whenever I start a new web application, it seems that there’s a fair amount of reinventing the wheel in terms of navigation and UI structure. There are tons of tools to help with the individual widgets on the page, including JQueryUI, ExtJS, Dojo, to name a few. They all offer buttons, dialogs, accordions, tabs, etc, that make up the page. Some have built-in layout managers, others leave it to you do separately, in which case you can roll your own, or base it on a grid layout like Blueprint CSS.
However, I haven’t come across a unified package that takes a well documented and rational approach to laying out the elements of a rich application. A framework would help you through questions like:
- How to navigate between modules of the application
- How to provide “grounding” (inform the user where they are in the app)
- where to place “action buttons”
- When to use sidebars, tables, portlets, etc
- Be well documented
- Include helper methods for the views/controllers to work with
- Be flexible enough to support the uniqueness of the actual app
- Integrate with Rails
Well known application suites have already figured all of this out. Whether it’s Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, Bamboo), 37signals (Basecamp, Highrise), or even Google’s suite, there is obviously something internally leading the consistency in design and layout principles.
It seems this would be a natural fit for Rails. For all its reputation as opinionated software, there should be a gem for opinionated application design that provides all the features above. There are things like web-app-theme, but they don’t really help you understand what to use when.
What’s out there? Or why isn’t there one? Drop a line to deafgreatdane@gmail.com, or leave a comment.
