I had a couple weeks off over the holidays. Since we didn’t have any big plans, I wanted to take the opportunity to learn something different. So I chose to dive into learning Lavaca.
Lavaca is a “curated collection of tools” that provides a “web application framework designed to jumpstart development of hybrid and single page applications”. It is available free from Github.
I had really thought that this would be a fairly quick exercise. I’m already familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, and so forth. But I was in for a bit of a surprise. I guess in the past few years that I’ve been focused on learning iOS and native mobile technologies, the face of web development has changed. And it’s changed a lot.
I’m glad to say that the days of throwing together some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to create a static website are gone. Websites are now created using real software engineering practices such as build systems, automated testing, dependency management, and formal deployment mechanisms. Sure, one can still throw together some files and upload them using FTP, but why would one want to do so? The good news is that there are powerful, open source tools available to automate and manage the whole process. The bad news (for me) was that there are a bunch of powerful, open source tools that I needed to learn to use. But that’s not really bad news, is it?
I realized that I needed a project to work on. I’ve never been able to learn new things very well unless I could find some way to apply it. So I reached back into my past projects, did some looking around, and found that the Celestino Couture website that I converted to WordPress several years ago hadn’t been updated in about that long. So I contacted Rusty and Sergio and asked if I could use their website as an exercise in learning Lavaca, and with their ok, off I went.
My goal in this exercise is to create a responsive web design that will be easy to maintain and extend over time, and can be deployed natively to Android and iOS devices, as well as the web and other mobile devices.
So I created a test site, and started through the Lavaca Guide, taking side trips to go learn Bower, RequireJS, Node, Grunt, YUIDoc, Dust, LESS, and Jasmine. It’s been fun, and I still have a lot to learn and a lot to do to finish up the new website, but it’s been a great experience. I’m really delighted with what our web team has been doing with Lavaca, and glad to get a better handle on the capabilities of responsive web versus native apps.
So that’s what I did over the holidays. I’ve got to say that it has been a blast! I still have a lot of learning to do, but I’m really enjoying it.