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by James Robertson.
Original Post: The Green Glow
Feed Title: Richard Demers Blog
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rademers-rss.xml
Feed Description: Richard Demers on Smalltalk
In The Ghost of PARTS, Jim Robertson talks about a new attempt to build a visual programming environment, which he considers to be similar to VSE PARTS, and just as useless. I have to agree, but with a caveat.
Years ago, I did a contract with a large Twin Cities firm that had already done a Parts app. In the beginning, our much smaller project was to use the same technology -- plus a complex framework built by a different consulting firm. We took a look at the code and knew that it was both overkill for our project and underkill for our needs -- way too complex but fully capable of getting in the way of getting something done in a reasonable timeframe. We argued for a simpler, more direct design, using the "green glow" of the Parts screens as a telling argument for ignoring the other project's framework -- hard to build, hard to debug, hard to maintain.
What did we do instead? You're probably thinking we went with the straight VSE ApplicationCoordinator framework, but you'd be wrong. The fact is that to support Parts, VSE did some things right. It provided a rich set of event-driven UI widgets that we could drive with a set of non-visual application logic objects (not PARTS) that we called "linkers." And this led to some very interesting UI application patterns.
Years have past since then, and I've developed my share of UI applications based on the standard VW ApplicationModel. Frankly, it's not very object-oriented. Huge numbers of methods get lumped into a single class, with variations of the same code repeated endlessly. Dividing the app into sub-apps using subcanvases and subwindows helps, but it's really just more of the same.
So now we have Pollock coming over the horizon, and it too uses event-driven widgets. Can my earlier experience with "linkers" be brought to bear in VW now? Hmmm, an interesting thought.
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