Setting-up Your First “Hello World” Page

Let’s begin by building a basic “hello world” page that does nothing more than grab a static “hello world” message from a (data) model, processes the message within the (business logic) controller and then send a message to a view. Pretty simple. But along the way we’ll discuss what each of the PHP classes does and how each of those classes (the Model classes, the View classes, and the Controller classes) all work together.

The Tiger Model Class

Now you’ll have all of the various YUI DOM and Events functions at your command. Let’s look at what the

The UI, good or bad, can shine a light on or cast a shadow over just how professional the rest of your team’s efforts have been.

But before we learn how to find a good UI professional, it makes sense to understand what UI is and how it fits into a truly professional product.

Understanding Good UI

You can assemble a world class Java / Oracle team who just built the most amazing technology, but if your UI has been an after thought, bad UI can make all that high-end technology look like it was written by a bunch of amateurs.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

The days of being able to use your Java or .NET people to build UI are over, actually they were over years ago, but sometimes it takes time for the rest of the development world to catch up to the technical realities.

Today’s UI developers are highly skilled, multi-disciplined specialists trained and experienced to not just add nice graphics and code HTML, but functionally design and improve how the application “interacts” with the end-user.

Professional UI is more than just nice looking graphics.

I recently worked with an IT manager of a major US corporation who told me, “We need to put some serious lipstick on this.” The problem wasn’t really their graphics, it was their workflow that needed a serious update and reworking. No amount of “lipstick” I could come up with was going to fix a blatantly bad design. They had let their Java staff design how the application would behave and it caused some serious confusion for the end users.

End-users don’t think like programmers and programmers usually don’t spend a lot of time thinking about, “Now, how can I make this easier for others to use?” No, generally their thought is, “How can I make this easier for me to code.”

It’s this kind of situation that results in a poorly designed UI.

First Things First

The basic problem with using back-end developers to build the front-end part of the application is that typically the back-end people can really only think like back-end developers, not end-users. The Java guy starts the application development process by building a database. That is exactly the wrong way to approach an application.

An application that will exhibit professional UI should always begin with the public interface development first. Whether you prefer to use wireframe documents or just rough-code some HTML pages out of the gate, these initial interfaces will be crucial in determining what functionality fires and when; and what, exactly, needs to ultimately get persisted in the database and in what tables.

Ultimately, building projects this way allows for much better documentation, it saves a lot of time and streamlines the effort for the back-end guys.