Chapter 4. Creating the initial UI
This chapter covers
- Generating UIs instantly with scaffolding
- Restyling the scaffolding
- Customizing the scaffolding for your project
We spent most of the last chapter on domain modeling. It’s time to reward that effort with an instant working web application based on the scaffolding you first saw in chapter 1. In this chapter, you’ll create that UI and take a closer look at how it works and how to customize its look.
Do you need scaffolding? No. Few live web applications are based on such UIs because they aren’t particularly user-friendly. Why not start working on a fancy UI for Hubbub? We have several reasons.
First, it’s nice to have a working web application quickly. It allows you to experiment with the domain model and show off progress to your boss, and it works brilliantly with a release early, release often approach. Getting to the same stage with a custom UI requires more of an investment in HTML, CSS, and back-end implementation. And the larger the domain model, the longer it takes to get to that point!
Second, scaffolding isn’t exclusive. You can develop a custom UI side by side with the scaffolding and even integrate the two. In the case of Hubbub, this allows you to create posts, add tags, and edit the content of posts, all while still developing the main timeline page. That makes it easier to test features and debug problems without inspecting the database directly.