For this assignment, you will be writing an assessment of different HTML templating systems. You may need to review a small amount of the literature on these to enable you to write recommendation on which template system a small company should adopt.

Purpose and Audience

Assume that you are working for a small company: the company has twelve software developers (including you), two project managers, one operations (server/deployment) person, and a CEO/founder. The company has traditionally been a casual gaming company but is going to start creating more web-based products.

You have been asked to come up with a recommendation for a templating system that can be used in upcoming projects. The company is looking for a server-side templating system. That is, HTML will be produced on the backend servers controlled by your company, not in the user's web browser.

What's being done here is that the system will use a “template” that describes the general layout of the HTML content, along with data from the programming language (likely fetched from the database), and combines the two so the user receives HTML that displays the actual data they're interested in.

You can choose the primary server-side programming language in use for these projects as part of the assignment: please state it clearly as part of your recommendation. Likely choices include Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and Java.

Assignment Process

You will write the recommendation in two drafts: rough and final.

This activity is the rough draft. It will simply clarify your own thinking about the different options available. You will not (yet) actually recommend a course of action, but will summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches.

In the final draft, you will convert those initial thoughts into a recommendation. The goal there will be to present the options and make your recommendation to

Because your rough draft is a preliminary exploration of possibilities, it should look rough. Even though the final draft will be formal, you can be informal in the rough draft. You can write it in the first person, or the third, or mix the two. Include questions for yourself that you haven't answered yet (“Are there other tools available for languages we might use in the future?”) or notes (“Keep this section short—they'll get bored otherwise”).

Format your draft recommendation as a series of bullet points. You may wish to organize them as a hierarchy, with some bullets more deeply indented than others. Each point may or may not be a full sentence, but it should be clear enough that someone else can understand it. (We're going to read this, after all.) We are not asking you to write a formal outline, as you may have been recommended in other classes. This is a working document, capturing your ideas in progress.

Note that your goal in the final recommendation is to present multiple options, with varying priorities, and recommend one of those. Therefore, in this draft, present several alternatives along with their different strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of what your company needs. (Feel free to make up additional information about your company.)

You may want to have a look at the A1 final draft description to see the end goal: the information you gather in the rough draft should support the final draft that you need to complete.

You do not need to include formal citations in the rough draft. However, you should list all of your references at the end, including all that you looked up, whether or not you used them directly in the draft. The reference list will remind you of where you found the material you needed, and can serve as a basis of your formal bibliography in the final draft. Remember to enclose material taken from other sources within quotation marks.

Put your name and student number at the top of the first page so that we can identify the author. Don't create a full title page. Put the references in any format you want. Use double spacing which is traditionally used for rough drafts to allow for revision marks on paper copies.

Updates

The draft should be long enough to contain a reasonable summary of the issues, and (probably more importantly) contain a reasonable amount of material to support the final draft.

You are selecting the (one) programming language in use for the web projects are part of the assignment scenario. You should them compare templating systems for that language.

The number of templating systems you compare is up to you. It should include ones that might realistically be chosen by a company in this scenario, which is likely a small number for any given programming language. You can exclude unlikely choices (for example, systems that have been abandoned by their authors, or ones superseded by newer projects) .

Submitting

Save/export your draft as a PDF. Submit the file to the CourSys activity Assignment 1 Rough Draft and to turnitin.com for "A1 Rough".