W4 Creative Project

This page should give you some ideas and guidance about what to do for the creative project for week 4.

This list is by no means canonical, it doesn't even list any of the server side frameworks that are available. You are allowed to use many different libraries; if you are unsure if something counts, feel free to email your TA and ask.

We are not going to try to duplicate any of the setup materials for these frameworks and libraries. This is left to you to find setup documentation that you can read and understand for the library that you choose -- don't worry, most of these frameworks have really good setup docs. Oftentimes, you can find blog posts by folks who just wanted to set up a "skeleton" project; these can often be even more helpful than the setup documentation provided by the library authors.

CSS libraries

• Bootstrap -- a CSS library for styling your page and making it responsive (work well on mobile as well as desktop browsers)
• Foundation -- a different CSS library for responsive styling

JS libraries

• jQuery -- a simple and well-documented JS library that makes writing JS a little easier and quicker. This library is in common usage in many web applications
• D3 -- (Data Driven Documents) a specialized library for visualizing data. (Built here at UW!)
• WebGL -- (Web Graphics Library) a specialized JS library for doing 3D and 2D graphics rendering

JS Frameworks

These frameworks are more involved. Vergil should have node.js installed on it already, but getting a skeleton application up and running will still be a project. Angluar and React should be easier to get started with than Node.

Note that since React and Angular and client side, and Node is server side, you could actually use two of these frameworks at the same time. (They serve different purposes, so it actually would make a lot of sense to use two. It shouldn't be THAT hard to use two of them at the same time, but haven't you spent two hours on this already?)

• ReactJS -- a client-side JS framework that help you build pages that respond to new data with ease. Built at Facebook, this framework seems to be a rising star, and when combined with ReactMobile, makes it possible to build smartphone apps out of the same components as your web application.
• Angular -- a client-side JS framework that provides structure for building medium-large web applications. It uses the MVC software development pattern, which takes some learning unto itself.
• Node -- a server-side JS framework that provides structure for building medium-large web applications. This framework is a paradigm shift because it runs JS in a place that traditional web developers are used to running it -- on the server itself. Historically, JS has only run on the client side in the browser, but JS can also run on the server, and let you do things like store data.