CUE Front for Designers
This section assumes that you use the Waiter supplied with CUE Front to render your web pages. This may well not be the case, since one of CUE Front's main objectives is to give customers the freedom to choose their own front-end technologies. The Cook serves web page content as language- and technology-independent JSON data that can easily be consumed by any front-end component — both server-based web applications and client-side applications such as mobile native apps.
If you are a designer or pure front-end developer, then you will only work with the Waiter and an accompanying design tool called Patternlab. The Waiter is a PHP application that uses the Twig templating engine to serve HTML pages. When the Waiter receives a request from a client, it simply forwards the request to the Cook. The Cook returns a JSON response. The Waiter then merges the returned JSON data with the appropriate Twig template and returns the result to the client.
As a designer, therefore, your responsibilities are to create a set of Twig templates and other design assets that generate pages from the JSON data supplied by the Cook. The supplied JSON data is your interface with the back-end developer: if it is insufficient, or badly suited to the production of the required pages, then it is up to the back-end developer to modify the data supplied by the Cook.
The Waiter supports styleguide-driven development – specifically, atomic design. A living style guide called Patternlab is delivered with the Waiter. Patternlab is a web application that supports atomic design by presenting all of a web site's atomic design components in a browseable catalog. Using Patternlab, you can see what pages (and all the individual design components from which the pages are built) look like on different devices. Patternlab does this by merging the design's Twig templates with static JSON data fragments. This means that you can use Patternlab to work "off-line" on a web site design — that is, without any access to the Cook or the Content Store.