Wednesday, May 17, 2006

The value of nice graphics for software libraries and frameworks

Some time ago I had an idea for a web site and some spare time. I chose the Maypole Perl framework and coded the whole thing. It took me just 2 weeks and I had something to show to my friends. It was not perfect and the framework was a bit constraining, it made some things easy but it was hard to extend it in directions that were not previewed by the authors of the framework, but in two weeks I really had something to show to non programmers. It was so liberating that I did not need to ask some graphic designers to create some skins for the web site or struggle with the graphics myself but I had a nice look out of the box. I am now moving the code from Maypole to the more powerful Catalyst/DBIC frameworks but still I reuse the page design my Maypole app had. I am a programmer, I know how to program but graphic design is alien land to me so to build a nice looking site I need to get the design from someone else.

I think one of the most important advantages of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django etc is that they let the programmer program and not worry about the graphic design.

1 comment:

zby said...

Yes - I agree, but the point was that if you bundle the graphics, which is complementary to the work of programmers, together with the programming libraries code you create much value for programmers.