Introduction

Hi! I’m Jeremy the solo founder of Pageous. I believe we threw the baby out with the bath water when we ditched server-side rendering for JavaScript powered single page applications. I had to do a double take when frontend devs told me what “server-side rendering” is now. “It’s when you put React in the cloud to hydrate your pages before they reach the browser.”, they said. Can’t we just go back to the simplicity of the classic server-side rendering of 2010? That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with Pageous while incorporating lessons learned over the past 15 years. Pageous is a SaaS application that empowers teams to buck the current trend of heavy, complex, framework powered frontends. Instead it realizes a development workflow with roots in a simpler past.

I’ve been a web developer for over 15 years specializing in Ruby on Rails applications. Early in my career classic server-side rendering began to feel incongruous with the rise of mobile. HTML and CSS felt like they should be “someone else’s job”. The problem laid bare a puzzle that’s solution would unleash a hellscape of pain upon us, the single page application.

Developing single page applications in the framework de-jour is exhausting. So much time is wasted rebuilding basic browser functionality in JavaScript. Technical barriers are too high for a designer that only knows HTML and CSS to contribute effectively. Feature development time has ballooned, fronted devs need to be “resourced” to accomplish anything. Bugs have proliferated, infinite spinners, buttons that do nothing when clicked. Browser features have stopped working as expected, bye-bye back button, good luck bookmarking that. It feels like we aren’t actually getting much benefit from single page applications. The drawbacks are real and the benefits seem superfluous. We have sold our soul to the devil for the Web 2.0 equivalent of blinking marquee text, and flames.gif.

The Solution: Pageous

If this resonates with you then Pageous might be a good fit for your team.

The 10,000 ft overview of Pageous is this:

1. Build your web application by configuring “pages” and “forms” using the Pageous editor.
2. Pages populate HTML templates you’ve written with data from one or more backend requests.
3. Forms submit data to the backend with a mutation and then render a template or redirect to a page.
4. Build a library of example responses for your requests.
5. Use these examples to preview your pages.
6. With a click, build a docker image.
7. The image bundles your templates, assets and the Pageous runtime.
8. Run the image and enjoy your live application. If this sounds useful you’re welcome to sign-up for an account it’s free. Or, let me tell you a bit more about the key design decisions of Pageous.

You don’t need to be an engineer to use it.

One thing I remember about “the good old days” was that designers often knew HTML and CSS. If they didn’t it was a low enough bar to learn in their spare time. With just HTML and CSS a designer could hand me design.html. It would be a fully styled page that they had already tested in the popular browsers. Not only did this workflow save me a lot of headaches it empowered non-devs. Designers, product managers and others could contribute to the product directly. Pageous intends to empower these non-devs by keeping things simple. It aims to capture the feeling of writing some HTML with a little CSS and a pinch of JavaScript, while still delivering a full dynamic web application powered by a backend.

It should still accommodate engineers.

“Alas, I’m an engineer and I don’t want to use your in browser editors. The command line is my kingdom. My text editor is my home. Let me use these things.”

I’m also an engineer with this problem. That’s why I want to accommodate a terminal workflow where feasible. A CLI tool is offered that enables project push/pull style editing from the CLI. Currently templates, layouts, assets (.css, .js, .png, etc.) and JSON examples can all be added and edited via the CLI.

First class independent development cycle.

That old workflow was so empowering for the designers. They could iterate and test their designs with just a browser and a text editor. There was no need for git or Rails or React or one of the other 100 technologies that an engineer works with today. The development was self contained. No one was “blocked” waiting for the backend component to be deployed to staging. I want to capture this same independence with Pageous. Request examples allow you to preview your pages with various data samples. This means that you can test your entire frontend design without needing the backend.

Simple builds and deploys.

I believe that containers have greatly simplified builds and deployments. So I’ve added the ability to build your Pageous project into a docker image with the click of a button. You don’t need to mess around with Dockerfiles or manage the build yourself. Pageous will handle all of that for you and push the image to your repository.

Utilitarian UI.

I’m advocating for others to use simple html pages and forms for their web applications. I’m suggesting users ditch complex frontend builds for simple technologies. Therefore, I must use simple HTML pages and forms for my web application. Pageous is not a product of itself yet but I want to keep that option open.

In Closing

I just want to give you a taste of the ideas behind Pageous. For more, please sign-up for an account it’s free. You only need to subscribe for builds. Feel free to browse the documentation to get a better understanding of our offering. Again, I’m a solo founder all feedback is appreciated. I can be reached at [email protected]. I want to make as much time as possible to help my users and prospective users.

Thanks! Jeremy