romkey / BootstrapWebSite

Simple web site/page builder for Arduino IDE projects, independent of network interface and web server

BootstrapWebSite

This library provides simple classes for managing a web site and pages on Arduino projects.

We use Bootstrap 4 to style the site. Bootstrap is a very popular and powerful web page framework. You've likely seen it in use on dozens of web sites. Bootstrap lets you build good looking web pages but can be verbose and fussy when you write the code for the pages.

Our goal with this library is to help Arduino project users generate simple, good looking pages without having to learn Bootstrap or other web frameworks. We're focussing on just a few, common things that we embed in pages rather than trying to build a complete framework that does every possible thing. Users should be able to quickly build simple sites without having to worry about the details of HTML and CSS.

This library is decoupled from the web server. It focusses solely on page creation and makes no assumptions about the way pages are actually served. It should work with any web server.

Limitations

In order to save local resources, we load Bootstrap from an external CDN. This will fail if the computer loading pages from the Arduino server is not also connected to the public Internet at the same time.

We use the Arduino String type. Memory management with String is problematic - it quickly causes heap fragmentation and may not work well in highly resource-constrained environments or in projects which are expected to run for a long time without rebooting.

This library currently does not assist with HTML or URL encoding. HTML needs to escape embedded <, > and & characters.

Usage

BootstrapWebSite

In this context of this library, a WebSite consists of the language of the site (given as a two character ISO language code), the site's name, an optional branding image, and a navigation bar consisting of links to individual pages on the site.

Usage:

BootstrapWebSite site();
BootstrapWebSite site("en");
BootstrapWebSite site("en", "My Awesome ESP8266 Server");

BootstrapWebPage

Usage:

BootstrapWebSite site("en", "My Groovy Site");
site.addPageToNav("Info", "/info") 

BootstrapWebPage page(&site, "Info");
page.addHeading("Info");
page.addContent(String("Uptime ") + millis());

ROADMAP

Plans for future work:

• refactor out WebSite and WebPage superclasses which do the basic site management and page creation work and are invoked via child classes which provide the CSS framework information
• add 404 pages to BootstrapWebSite
• implement addFooter
• add HTML Form support - possibly addForm with a FormElement superclass
• try to implement HTMLEncodedString to automatically encode content
• look at reducing heap fragmentation by reducing the use of String
• unit testing