Application Skeletons
The easiest way to get started with an ESP application is to use one of the ESP application skeletons. Skeletons are integrated starter packages for ESP applications. Skeletons typically include default web pages, layouts, partial pages, stylesheets, scripts and required dependent packages for an easy, one-step launch of your web application.
Popular Skeletons
| Package Name | Description |
|---|---|
| esp-html-skeleton | ESP application skeleton for HTML5 MVC applications using server-side view pages. |
| esp-vue-skeleton | ESP application starter skeleton for client-side VueJS Applications. |
esp-html-skeleton
The esp-html-skeleton is a complete skeleton for building HTML5 MVC applications with server-side page views. The skeleton configures ESP and Expansive and provides:
- ESP page compilation
- ESP controller compilation
- Default home page
- Default Less style sheet and theming
- Generation of controllers
- Generation of database tables
- Generation of database migrations
- Generation of resource scaffolds with Add/Edit/Delete controller actions and views
- RESTful URLs mapped onto controller actions
- Initial Expansive configuration
- Processing of Less stylesheets into CSS
- Minifying Javascripts
- Minifying stylesheets
- Compression of files using gzip for production
- Development and production modes
The skeleton supports debug and release modes of operation via the pak.mode property in the pak.json file. By default, debug mode will select minified scripts with symbol map files, otherwise unminified versions will be used. Release mode will minify scripts as required.
See the esp-html-skeleton Git Repository for more details and documentation.
esp-vue-skeleton
The esp-vue-skeleton is a skeleton for building VueJS applications with client-side views in a Single-Page-Architecture (SPA) application. The skeleton uses VueJS, the Vue CLI, Vuetify and ESP and provides:
- Full ESP integration with VueJS
- Library of VueJS directives and helpers
- ESP page compilation
- ESP controller compilation
- Default VueJS home page for the application
- Default Less style sheet and theming
- Generation of server-side controllers
- Generation of database tables
- Generation of database migrations
- Generation of resource scaffolds with client-side VueJS views
- RESTful URLs mapped onto controller actions
- Initial Expansive configuration
- Processing of Less stylesheets into CSS
- Minifying Javascripts
- Minifying stylesheets
- Minifying VueJS scripts
- Compression of files using gzip for production
- Development and production modes
- Packaging of the VueJS application into a single script file for efficient execution.
The skeleton supports debug and release modes of operation via the pak.mode property in the pak.json file. By default, debug mode will select minified scripts with symbol map files, otherwise not minified versions will be used. Release mode will minify scripts as required.
See the esp-vue-skeleton Git Repository for more details and documentation.
Upgrading Skeletons
Skeletons install default content that may then modified and customized to suit your individual needs and tastes. As such, when you upgrade a Skeleton, it must take care not to overwrite any of your changes. Layouts, partial, and content pages will not be upgraded when you run pak upgrade to upgrade your installed packages. If you must upgrade to a more recent version of the skeleton, create a new application and manually migrate the upgraded files.