SyntaxHighlighter setup

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

On the client-side

I have been writing rich web applications for 5 plus years and have gotten pretty good at it (and getting better all the time I hope). I am entirely satisfied with the sort of interfaces and functionality that I can achieve combining server-side code with client-side javascript, HTML and CSS, except for one tiny little complaint; client-side code takes forever!  Compared with the productivity that I can achieve writing the server-side code, the level of effort that goes into writing the client-side code is daunting.

I am committed to changing that in a significant way.  There are some very interesting tools emerging in this regard; some of the ones currently attracting my attention are:
  • CoffeeScript: a very interesting language that compiles down to readable and efficient javascript.
  • LessCss: Css with the basic programming structures that geeks expect.  Again compiles down to CSS.
and other similar stuff. More to come.