For a complete map of all the sections in this website, go to the site map.
The Texmate, Inc website is designed for Modern Standards Compliant (xhtml + css) browsers on all computer platforms.
This means it will look as plain as an Amish coat in Netscape 4.x, or any some other such antiquated piece of software that passes for a web browser.
So why not take this opportunity to take a leap into the modern era, and get Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or update your current browser to the latest version?
Basically any decent Standards Compliant browser that fully supports CSS2 (cascading style sheets) and Javascript will work fine on this site. If you have any questions regarding this website please email the design team at Texmate Inc.
Contact the design team
Contact the website design team to report any problems or feedback or for further information on this website, to report unauthorised use or for permission to use parts of this website in your website or publication - admin@texmate.com.
So, how's this website built?
There's two main parts to the website when talking about how it is built:
We'll talk a little about both below:
The Front End
The front end was rapidly developed using some excellent web development tools now available: Blueprints CSS, and MooTools. Blueprint CSS is a really neat development: a CSS framework making rapid development of page layouts fast and efficient. The other part is mootools - used to enhance user interaction with the site such as in the super awesome PDF quote generating meter configuration tool. MooTools will get more usage across the site as we further develop this website interactivity.
The Back End
The back end was an interesting challenge: We already had a legacy application available to work with, written entirely in PHP, and a MySQL database to go with it. The PHP application weighed in at over 43,000 lines of code which was mostly written around 2001-2003 with a few tweaks here and there over the ensuing years. It was a totally custom application with only a simple framework behind it for database abstraction and user management - again, all custom. So what to do? Did we modify that mammoth php codebase and make it better, or did we throw it out and go for something completely different?
And now for something completely different...
You guessed it - completely different. And if you got the Monty Python reference you'll already know what we're going to say next. It's all Python code. Thanks to the wonderful work done on the Django project and it's promise of Database Introspection, a powerful Object-relational mapper, and an Automatic Admin interface, that was all we needed.
Database Introspection meant we could keep the existing database (very valuable) and integrate right into it. Django provided the tools to create rudimentary models of the data which were then separated out into separate applications and tweaked and added to get to where we wanted to be for the future. So, after that, it's sitting right about 5000 lines of nice clean and very maintainable Python code - and most of that is just the Database Object Model definitions and the super enhanced meter configuration tool and it's associated custom views. Huge props are due to the Django team who've built a world class framework that made this all possible in such a tight timeframe.
Modern Standards Compliant Browsers:
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