Hi All,

looking for your thoughts and suggestions to assist please.

If you were designing/building a BIG Component that was the core to a major online Joomla! application...

Would you also create Modules to perform 'tasks' such as Data Entry and Reporting as a separate task to the component to keep things more 'organised'? (Yes, I know j-cook builds front end and back end for me..)

Would you simply create a final build of the Component with j-cook and then edit each and every Front End layout that was a part of the Component/Application - cutomise the CSS look and feel, adding additional elements such as Commentary/Text etc..

And if the above choice where would be the best place to start with the customisation of the required layouts for the look and feel of the Joomla! template/site. In the Views? Sure.. much work with some 30 Tables and 35 layouts.

And if you were required to also create 'Reports' from the data in the tables of the Component would you build those into the Component - or create them separately in Modules..??

Your thoughts? Any suggestions? Recommendations? Ideas?

Thank you good people!

Regards,

Ed.

Well, I am not sure to understand well all the points.

I start to answer with my own opinion.

If you have a lot of views / screens... You sould have a lot of work. Don't know how to avoid this.


FIRST POSSIBILITY :
Maybe you can create a JDom class that allows you to layout your objects. It was in projects (It was orking and then I suppressed it, because too much confusion for beginners I guess). I mean instead of writing DIVS of TABLES, FIELDSETS... you abstract all this, and then you can customize ALL YOUR LAYOUTS as you want and modify all of them very easily.

The power of JDom is to have a ready to call structure, where you can do what you want !!




SECOND POSSIBILITY

Create a full javascript interface (Cook is a Cook based component hi hi... Rewrited 4 times with Cook !)

Instead of returning html layouts, create some functions that returns you objects in JSON or XML (also in the roadmap... RSS too).
By this way, you get your filtered objects lists and flys without any template. ONLY raw object that you pass in another renderer framework in JS in this case.


THIRD POSSIBILITY :
Create a PHP rendered framework for your project and deal directly with the functionalities of your models.
i mean, you can do in you proper maneer, avoiding the native VIEW functions of your component.

Do as you want.
If you understand well how the MVC is built you can play with as you want.