Andrus wrote:
>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.
I agree. I remember back in '93 trying to make sense of a fruit o-o
example. I couldn't figure out why someone would create classes with
names of fruits. I still can't think of a reason to do it that way
unless you wanted your fruit types hard-coded into your app, which isn't
usually the best idea anyways.
The appeal of the naked objects concept is that I see a rather large
niche of small businesses that would love a custom application that
meets their particular data needs, but wouldn't even consider paying the
big bucks it takes to build a custom UI. I think they would trade a
steeper learning curve for a greatly reduced price tag. After they feel
comfortable with the data model they still have to option to
incrementally replace the default UI with a custom UI.
JStaple sounds interesting. Hopefully the documentation will be good
enough to pick it up and start using it easily.
Thanks,
Jonathan
>>> Andrus Adamchik <andru..bjectstyle.org> 2004-09-09 4:15:15 PM >>>
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
*********************************************************************************
This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and
intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they
are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify
the system manager.
Katun Corporation -- Celebrating 25 Years of Service
www.katun.com
*********************************************************************************
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Fri Sep 10 2004 - 11:40:41 EDT