Are there good classes for web GUI architecture?

Question

I'm a GUI developer in a big company that thinks "developer" == "java". Through sheer force of willpower and talent, I've convinced them that thinking about the GUI as a structured aspect of the site rather than an "eh we'll take care of that later" value-add is important.

So I want to take some courses to move my career upward on this job I've invented here, but I'm having some difficulty finding things that are appropriate. I'm finding mostly wild ends of the spectrum: either "java enterprise programming" sort of courses, or "this is how you add margin to a div" sort of courses.

What I'm looking for is something like web gui architecture. We're a global site with many locales, so I have to think about the best way to structure our stylesheets and javascript. I don't like how we're doing css aggregations now, I'd like to learn better tools/methods for that. I want to implement far future expiration on our static content in a way that is invisible to the developers (like at build time, say). Essentially, the sort of complex GUI-related tasks that can still intersect with larger parts of the organization, like site architecture and operations. Also strategies for managing gui work of other developers, like how to effectively document standards for others, suggestions on how best to manage a page in divs in a flexible-width design that doesn't make me want to throw the whole thing out and build it out of 1997 tables, etc.

These are all topics I've seen individually around the web, but I learn better in a more structured environment, and these aren't new questions so I'm sure there are enough other people with this job that need training. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I am not sure you can find many "classes" about it, but there are some conferences along those lines. I know I am really looking forward to An Event Apart when it comes to my city this summer. I am hoping to learn new tactics for web site UI and design.

Answer 2

I haven't seen much in the way of traditional education for the more complex web development concepts. As you say, there's plenty of show-you-how-to-set-margins-on-divs hustlers out there, but in-depth framework/architecture issues are still sort of frontier territory, as far as I can tell.

I think your best bet is to cultivate a collection of blogs centered around this topic and start soaking in as much as you can on a daily basis from the soldiers in the field. Web developers are a remarkably vocal bunch; we tend to start shouting from the blogs when a new best-practices idea comes along. Follow up with Google and Wikipedia when you read something you don't understand.

Most importantly, fire up a text editor and just start playing. It's a simple matter of "beat your head against the topic until you start seeing the problems, and then beat your head against the problems until you start seeing solutions".

As far as I can tell from my little neck of the woods, web development is still less certification-crazy than the rest of the IT development world. So you don't have to worry too much about checkboxes on your resume.

Here's some sites I find useful for day to day web framework interest:

• A list Apart (mentioned above for their event)
• Ajaxian
• Webmonkey
• CSS3.info
• 24ways.org
• Google Webmaster Blog

And of course StackOverflow is the mechanical turk of web development gotchas.

Good luck.

Answer 3

I really like ExtJs (even I haven't used it myself). It is developed with Google Web Toolkit and you can achieve really impressive web applications. If you like JAVA, then GWT is for you. You can integrate it very well with your projects if you use Eclipse/Netbeans.