Market research

Looking at the market for this service.

One of the main goals of Luan is to make web development simpler. The target audience is a specific group of people who understand programming, but are not professional programmers. Some examples are lawyers, doctors, engineers, teachers, etc.

Building a website isn't very simple. You have to grasp the concepts behind the http protocol, html, css and possibly a database system. Luan simplifies all that work, but those concepts are still there. The question I have in mind now is: should we leave all these concepts out there, forcing people to deal with them? Or should we build a layer on top of that and make page creation simpler? For example, we could have components that build headers, footers, data tables, etc. This would abstract a lot of the web development, but those components would be limited and would require a lot of documentation. What do you have in mind?

To build a basic site, a user needs HTML, Bootstrap, and Lucene.  He shouldn't need CSS if he can accept the Bootstrap style.  The only HTTP he needs is accessing parameters.  That is my hope but we will see what happens in practice.  Also, we can provide samples as starting points and people can tweak those.

By the way, what did you think of Ruby on Rails?

fschmidt wrote

To build a basic site, a user needs HTML, Bootstrap, and Lucene.  He shouldn't need CSS if he can accept the Bootstrap style.  The only HTTP he needs is accessing parameters.  That is my hope but we will see what happens in practice.  Also, we can provide samples as starting points and people can tweak those.

Yes, we have to see what happens in practice. We have to find someone that doesn't master these concepts and is willing to build a website. This person should drive the development.

fschmidt wrote

By the way, what did you think of Ruby on Rails?

I watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ8_VOGj5H8
A friend of mine said that RoR is VERY simple. I am totally confused because the root folder of the project created in the video has ELEVEN subfolders. Each subfolder has more subfolders and configuration files. The idea of simplicity is totally broken. What I also don't like in RoR is that you have to keep calling command line tools to generate code for you. Of course you can build the pieces by hand, but generating code is something that I always avoid. When I look at a luan project, I see just a few files. It is much simpler. I think we can also build some videos and put on youtube. This is much better than reading docs.

Thanks, if you don't have anything else, you can close this.

I couldn't find a simple framework that is comparable to Luan. Node.js is great in many ways, but it forces you to handle everything asynchronously and this isn't intuitive. So I will stop my market research now and close this thread.