Power Pages bridge the gap between traditional web applications and a single page application. Power Pages are a super set of single page applications which gets integrated with existing web application. Power Pages help to integrate or add a set of functionality into an existing web application. It works in a similar manner as Single Page Application but they can communicate with existing web applications also. Power Pages can be built on top of existing web applications having multiple pages and can give a complete and compact view of the entire or part of the entire system. It has an unique ability to adapt to an existing ecosystem of the host application. It can replace a set of existing functionality or add a completely new set of functionality to any existing system.
Let us take an example to understand what is a Power Page and what it can offer in terms of simplifying complex applications.
A scheduling Power Page
This following Power Page example is built for a CRM in the healthcare domain where it interacts with underlying CRM system and provides an interface to schedule and manage appointments. Without Power Pages this would have been a very cumbersome process. This scheduling Power Page hosts a large number of functionalities.
Adding Schedule
: This part of Power Page shows how an appointment can be added into the existing CRM system. Client side scripting which is done to color different schedule types is possible using Power Page.
Filtering location based schedule: Using Power Pages, we have integrated a view of the calendar and action items that can be done directly within the calendar itself. Each user action has a data getting posted on the server and updating the view without user experiencing a physical refresh of he page. Filtering, sorting, etc are an integral part of Power Pages and moves most of the computation to the client’s machine and hence offloading server from computation related tasks.
Showing Individual appointment in details
: This Power Page shows details on tool-tip instead of opening a new page with details. Instead of having multiple pages, Power Page have multiple views which integrates into a concise application.
How does a Power page work?
Power Pages load the very first time the application is requested. This rendered Power Page represents the entire application in the browser. Here, one HTML application will have multiple views embedded into it. Each view on this application responds to actions performed on a view or a set of views. An user action results in some action on the server, which in turn returns some result, and this result is interpreted on the client-side and rendered on the client side. Hence, the server is off-loaded from sending rendered page information for every user action. The server only sends the data for each action and the rest is taken up by the client side.
How do you build a Power Page?
With the very best frameworks available today, (Backbone, Angular, Knockout…), Power Pages are quick to build. With JavaScript at the core, there could be endless possibilities which can be achieved using Power Pages. There are various syntactic sugar over JavaScript (Typescript, CoffeeScript…) which makes it easy for a non-web-developer to adapt quickly and build Power Pages. Power Pages follow the modern paradigm of MV*pattern where Model is the data on the server and View, the way the data is interpreted and displayed on the HTML. On each user action on a view, model is changed and data is passed on to the client where a new view is rendered. Views in a Power Page are directly bound to the model, so any change on any model is reflected back to View and vice-versa.
Power Page communicate with the server using REST/Web APIs, which makes it more powerful, as it communicates with multiple servers or it can talk to multiple service providers at once.
Power Pages Example (Application built with pure power pages)
Online Form Builder: User will be able to create web-forms by dragging and dropping controls on the canvas.
All these controls placed are views
It applies CSS on the fly using local storage for the final form built
Power Page integrated with existing CRM solution and having bi-directional communication with CRM server using Web APIs
We, at Nalashaa, have created many power pages which act as a façade to many complex applications which we have built. We have Dynamic CRM systems which are running on many domains and our power pages help users at any level interact with CRM with a highly reduced level of complexity. We have used Power pages to replace a few legacy application interfaces and to add new functionality features over existing application.
If you would like to know more about Power pages and how it might reduce the complexity of your CRM system, drop us a line.
