Balsamiq

Go from Mockup to Code with Reify

The following is a guest blog post by Raymond Ha of Isomorphic Software. Enjoy!

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Hi, Everyone, I’m Ray from Isomorphic Software, the creators of SmartClient and Smart GWT. If you haven't heard of our technology before, SmartClient and Smart GWT are HTML5/AJAX platforms that are used to build complex web applications, especially those that involve lots of screens, lots of data and power user features.

We’re big fans of Balsamiq, so we’re excited to announce a new tool that generates SmartClient and Smart GWT code from Balsamiq mockups in one easy step. It’s called Reify – an actual English word meaning "to make something abstract more real or concrete".

There are already several tools available that can turn Balsamiq mockups into simple interactive web pages, PDFs, and other formats so they can be more easily shared. That's not what Reify does.

Instead, Reify deeply analyzes your Balsamiq mockups, and produces source code similar to what a developer might write by hand. This allows your team to skip over the phase of painstakingly recreating the UI shown in the mockup, and move directly to adding business logic and data binding.

Watch the Video

Don’t re-create. Re-use.

Reify allows you to get much more out of your Balsamiq mockups. Normally, when a mockup is handed off for implementation, your developers needed to laboriously duplicate the mockup in actual code - one screen at a time. This is an enormous waste of time and effort, and typically causes extra iterations as developers inevitably miss subtle but important details. With Reify, you can go straight from a mockup to working code that reproduces your intended design.

How does it work?

In Balsamiq, placing a widget on top of a window or tab is enough for the mockup to look right. However, working applications need to know that a widget is contained by a tab or window, or the wrong thing will happen when the screen is resized or the window dragged.

Reify deeply analyzes your mockup to discover the relationships that are implied by the way you arranged widgets. Containment relationships are automatically discovered, labels are automatically associated with input controls, input controls are automatically grouped into logical forms, and aligned components are grouped into flexible layouts that respond as expected to browser resizes.

Reify even compensates for imprecision in mockups by recognizing that a set of controls is meant to be perfectly aligned even if the mockup is a few pixels off, and recognizing that the intended size of a control is its visible size, not the size of its (invisible) bounding box.

Clean, Extensible Code

Tools that generate code often produce awful results that cannot be meaningfully extended. Reify is different.

Reify outputs screens in Isomorphic’s Component XML format, a concise, declarative format similar to Flash’s MXML or Microsoft’s XAML. Reify makes great efforts to produce clean, minimal code. For example, if a component gets its size from its container, Reify won’t output the redundant size information on the component. More generally, Reify will avoid outputting code that would set a property to its default value.

Screens created by Reify can be connected to real data sources in one step, and event handlers and business logic can be added while keeping the screen definition in XML. This enables a clean separation between layout and logic, and allows non-developers to understand and modify screen layout without breaking business logic.

No Limits

You can easily mix and match between screens imported via Reify and classic hand-coded screens and layouts. For example, if you have created a highly dynamic, portal-style layout manager that couldn’t be built just with XML, you can still use Reify to create portlets, wizards, and other screens controlled by your advanced layout manager.

Or, you can create a screen that has a placeholder for a dynamically generated component, and insert that component programmatically after the Reify-created screen is loaded.

Reify lets you maintain any part of your application in easy-to-read, easy-to-modify XML, while still allowing advanced, data driven techniques to be used wherever appropriate - the best of both worlds.

Get Started

You can Try Reify online, without installing anything, at the live demo site! Here are two sample mockups so you can try it right now (Sample 1: Resize bars & Layouts; Sample 2: Navigation, Charts). Or, if you’re ready to get started then download our free 60-day trial.

Thanks

Thanks to the Balsamiq team for creating one of the best tools in the business. We hope that Reify will become another invaluable tool in your arsenal. If you have any questions, please Contact Us or visit our Forums.

The Isomorphic Team
http://www.smartclient.com/

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