New feature: Parent Pages
Friday afternoon saw the implementation of an idea I had first thought about some two years ago. Now I wish I had implemented it way back then.
Today we were working on an application with a LOT of pages. Each page included a header, a navigation panel, some html to bind the parts together and the specific content for the page in question. It's a model that's in 99% of applications I have seen, the duplication and redundancy has always bothered me but had been unable to come up with an elegant way of solving the issue. Until now.
Now we have the ability to flag any page as belonging to a parent. When the browser requests the page, the server determines that it should be displayed inside its parent and renders the child page inside the parent at the location of the first
tag. This affords ALL layout to be written only once on the parent page and the child to contain no layout (other than that specific to its own unique functionality), just the fields and javascript for that page.
I see Puakma Tornado server squarely in the business market. If you can reduce build and maintenance times for an application by even 10% then we have a huge dollar saving.
I recall doing some work for a large bank here in Australia. They had decided to rebrand their Domino based Intranet which consisted of a few hundred applications (seperate .nsf files). The task was a killer - every page in every application had to be touched and manually made over. All in all not so much of a fun job! With this new Tornado feature it would simply mean changing one page design element to have a radically different on screen layout.
We haven't implemented parents of parents yet, but that should be a simple tweak when the moment calls. I can't think of a scenario where that would be useful, but I'm sure one of our customers will ;-)
