Our Spiffy UI

by Zack Grossbart on August 9, 2010

Update: The Spiffy UI Framework mentioned in this presentation is now open source. Check it out at http://www.spiffyui.org.

I’ve been working on a new project called The Novell Identity Manager Reporting Module. It generates comprehensive reports about identity data in very large organizations. It was also a chance to build a new web application from the ground up.

Official product names take a long time so within our group this project was known as Our Spiffy Reporting Tool. It represents many new directions and innovations for web application UI. It’s the application of some new philosophies. We integrated fluid grids and vertical rhythm, called all of our APIs using REST from GWT, and created a new auto-complete multi-valued suggest box.

This presentation also shows some of my personal transformation from desktop programming snob to a happy web application developer.

Here’s Our Spiffy UI:

This presentation was given in the browser with JQuery. It’s all open source and you can see the slides online.