This project is licensed under the MIT License. Copyright 2011, Victor1 LLC.
Author is David Bergman, of Victor1 LLC.
The transition from design to coding is often quite painful, where the coders dissect the poor well-designed creature lying on their table, fresh out of a creative mind. A lot of cutting and gluing. Additionally, when design elements need to change, the poor body is sent back to the designer, although now in a zombie-like form, alternatively hacked into pieces, with a lot of code inserted, confusing both designer and her tool.
Enliven consists of a library of JavaScript code, acting as glue to the design pages. The only prerequisite is that these pages are marked with special CSS classes.
Enliven provides functions to populate lists or individual elements of the design page with live data, provided as a hash or list of hashes. The unique feature is that the existing design is used for the individual element(s), provided as sample data.
Alas, no HTML snippets is to be found in code using Enliven. A coder should not deal with HTML design, not even dissect such design into pieces.
The goal is that the designer's deliverables live completely intact throughout the lifespan of the system, except for intentional design changes, of course. I want the designer to be able to get back into the HTML (and CSS) files as he left them and change things without having to involve the coder for anything else but redeployments.
Lofty goal? Perhaps, but if solved, Enliven could make lives so much easier for a lot of teams currently suffering from this dichotomy.
There is also a goal of keeping Enliven back end agnostic, although the intention is to provide "plugins" for common back end scenarios, such as CouchDB and Ruby REST services.
The code is written in CoffeeScript, and translated to JavaScript. The generated file is also part of this repository, in the build directory, to simplify its use.
If you want to make changes to the code, you install CoffeeScript and then
run compile.sh whenever you have changed the logic. This will generate the
proper JS file.
Look at the simple example in samples; just open the simple_list.html in
a browser and enjoy.