A tool called Maqetta is the result of discussions among more than 120 companies are members of OpenAjax Alliance, an industry alliance involved in the development of programming techniques based on Ajax. Maqetta is an open-source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag-and-drop assembly, and supports both desktop and mobile user interfaces.
The Preview 1 release of the Maqetta application is available for the community to use for free at project’s Website, http://maqetta.org. Alternatively, you can download the source code and install it on your own server, customize the code to fit your needs and/or contribute improvements to the open source project.
The primary target users for Maqetta are user-experience designers, or UXD, within enterprise development teams, with the goal of improving overall team efficiency around HTML5 application development.
Maqetta features include:
- a WYSIWYG visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces;
- a drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an exact-dimension device silhouette, such as the silhouette of an iPhone;
- simultaneous editing in either design or source views;
- deep support for CSS styling (the application includes a full CSS parser/modeler);
- a mechanism for organizing a UI prototype into a series of “application states” (aka “screens” or “panels”), which allows a UI design to define interactivity without programming;
- a Web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mock-up for review by his team members;
- a “wire-framing” feature that allows UI designers to create UI proposals that have a hand-drawn look;
- a theme editor for customizing the visual styling of a collection of widgets;
- export options that allow for smooth hand-off of the UI mock-ups into leading developer tools such as Eclipse; and
- its code base has a toolkit-independent architecture that allows for plugging in arbitrary widget libraries and CSS themes.
After two years of work at IBM’s Impact 2011 conference, shown running in the browser tool to visually build Web interfaces and Web applications. It is able, according to the technical director of IBM’s David Bolokera, equal to what Adobe and Microsoft offer. Remember that Maqetta application is currently at the preview level, however, promises to be very interesting tool.
Source: maqetta.org | eweek.com