About this book

The purpose of this book and related documentation and a bit about Zen and Mashweb.

The creation of new social media apps and other web apps should be as simple as writing a post in a blogging app like WordPress or Medium. Why isn't it? It could soon be. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Let a trillion flowers bloom.

Zen is a web application framework with sequential programming as its core. It is being built with the belief that the creation of web applications would be vastly simplified if the applications were built upon a framework that supports sequential programming. It is being built also with the belief that a few big problems of web page styling can be solved or worked around with just a few simple methods.

The author hopes that someday nontechnical users could build their own web applications, not just web pages and websites, perhaps using "dumbed down" visual program editors. Suggesting that it is necessary to "dumb down" something so that nontechnical users can use it insults all nontechnical people, of course. The author doesn't really believe programming has to be dumbed down, but just needs to be layered in such a way that people can immediately create useful programs with only a few minutes of learning. Programmers seem to have missed or considered unimportant the reality that there are millions of potential beginner web applications that could be created if the learning curve were not so steep. The web is fertile ground for an amateur programmer to plough.

This Guide is meant to be a complete guide to the Zen web application framework and the Mashweb community concept. Since it is hosted by GitBook.com on their free Community plan, it must be (can only be) edited by its owner, although pull requests can be issued by others. Its audience is mainly programmers and web developers, whether wizardly or amateur. Some of it should be comprehensible to many non programmers and non web developers who have only a general knowledge of computers and the web.