I looked at naked objects in the past, though very briefly. And while I
like the idea of building the GUi with as fewer layers as possible
between the view and the model, I wasn't exactly psyched about their
particular flavor of it. I don't know anything at all about the nuances
of their framework, so I may have misunderstood it, but I still believe
that GUI exists to provide a user-friendly abstraction of the system
instead of simply exposing its guts (in fact it should hide as much of
this as possible).
I remember back in the day when I was reading my first book on Object
Oriented programming, the author was making a parallel between an
object in a computer language and a thing in a real world. To me this
was the most confusing analogy ever! I simply couldn't comprehend a
system consisting exclusively of objects meaningful in a real world. An
Account or Employee has meaning, even DataObject is kind of ok, but
what is the real-world counterpart of
org.objectstyle.cayenne.access.jdbc.ChainDirective ;-) Here goes naked
objects...
But... Having said that, I really like the frameworks that take some
metadata and generate UI from it (esp. if they produce the code you can
later change). One such framework is WebObjects Direct2Web. For those
who are not familiar with it, it takes an ORM mapping data and
generates customizable search, display and edit web components. This is
just awesome! Steve Jobs demoed a similar framework for Mac OS X Cocoa
during WWDC this year. Both of course internally rely on a binding
layer, not on exposing an object via some generic UI widgets. There is
a big difference.
JStaple is an idea for a foundation of such framework in Swing (making
generic binding wizards on top of it is supposed top be a snap).
Also, no matter what I said about naked objects above, I am very
curious to see what you come up with ;-)
Andrus
On Sep 7, 2004, at 12:55 PM, Jonathan Carlson wrote:
> Is anyone familiar with the concept of creating a generic UI framework
> that allows one to write an application with only business object
> attributes and methods?
>
> http://www.nakedobjects.org
> http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=NakedObjectSeries_5
> http://www.jroller.com/page/cv/20040211#naked_eclipse_objects
>
> I am really intrigued by the possibility of using Cayenne's rich
> metadata to build a generic UI (probably web-based in my case) that
> would work for lots of different application domains.
>
> I looked into the concept of naked objects last year sometime and then
> forgot about it because the current implementation at
> http://www.nakedobjects.org seemed rather unintuitive, had no security,
> and seemed to lacked scalability.
>
> But recently my company has chosen a new ERP that uses a concept
> similar to this (using Oracle packages instead of objects and a mostly
> generic Windows UI). I started to realize that this concept really
> could scale if the framework was coded right and was more intuitive.
>
> I'll keep looking into this. Hopefully I can come up with a generic
> web UI framework for Cayenne data objects that I can open source.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Jonathan
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