Client Snapshot: The client is a technology company that has developed a proprietary tool that enables non-technical users to build workflow applications and forms with no coding necessary. With Keyhole’s help, this client was able to successfully finish building their tool and now serves clients all over the U.S. and in some parts of Europe as well.
Project Overview
Keyhole consultants assisted the client with a proprietary designer platform for end users. This tool enables a non-programmer to create a form-based web application without using code—simply by dragging UI elements onto a form page. The form contains pages that have UI elements, each element with associated properties that are interactive at design time. Each element has behaviors that impart program logic to the form. The tool user interacts with those artifacts by dragging and dropping elements, drawing behavior or workflow connections, modifying properties, and then saving the form, as XML, to a server. A web-based player interprets the form XML to serve it to an end-user as a web application.
Technology Details
The existing Designer was written in Adobe ActionScript as a single-page application residing in the form author’s browser. Throughout this project, a hybrid team of the client’s employees and Keyhole Software consultants migrated the ActionScript rendition of the tool to a JavaScript single-page application.
As a part of this effort, a Keyhole UI expert was brought in to create a new user interface layout and design for the Designer. This included building out the designer front end according to modern design standards and creating numerous visual elements and icons (100+). In addition, he redesigned the dashboard and log-in for the designer, now ensuring that each was responsive to device constraints.
His next task was to build out the front-end framework for the backend team and to add the ability to use mobile devices for playback with Keyhole’s assistance. Central JavaScript technologies involved in the development and migration include HTML5 drag-drop, HTML5 canvas, Backbone.js for its unrestrictive event coordination, and jQuery, which were industry-standard at the time.