Strategy for building user content about maqetta

[JonFerraiolo]

@jhpedemonte, @childsb

For mobile UIs, one can expect that designers will want to preview their creation directly on target devices. For example, if an author creates an iPhone UI, then might pull out their iPhone and open up the URL for their Maqetta-created HTML file from their iPhone.

Without doing a build, the UIs are going to appear very slowly on the mobile device because of high latencies with mobile networks. This will likely cause lots of negative perceptions about Maqetta and web-based mobile UIs because it will be challenging to educate Maqetta users and their team members that (hand-waving) it will be faster once the development team goes into production and uses the Dojo build system.

Something that seems achievable is have Maqetta do a little build magic for preview-in-browser and ZIP download. In both cases, the server could run build scripts on the content and deliver a built version of dojo.js. Easier said than done, of course.

[peller]

I don't know what the timeline is, but there are projects underway to do exactly this, generating dynamic builds on the fly. Zazl, requirejs, and Lotus all have efforts in this area. The other option is to include some layer as part of the Dojo we deploy. In fact, I think mobile.js (and the "base") should already be built.

[peller]

see #1586

[peller]

leaving this ticket open to investigate using the dojo web builder as a web service, once it supports 1.7

[peller]

depends on #1750

[peller]

-> M7/High