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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Glue based programming
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Software Factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development by significantly increasing the level of automation in application development, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components. Software Factories go beyond models as documentation, using highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.
Hmm - color me not sold. Sounds too much like PARTS and the Visual Editor in VAST - both of which end up enabling "green haze" (we actually used that phrase in sales back at ParcPlace in the early 90's). The issue is a simple one - wiring components together sounds great, and it works really well on small problems. Once the problem gets to be medium sized, it completely breaks down. Too many wires, too many connections - Green Haze. Sure, tools can allow for making some connections visible and others invisible - and that helps, some. Not enough, in my experience. People have been trying to bring this style of development forward for a long time now. I don't think it works, because it doesn't scale visually.
<sarcasm>Of course, it's probably better now - using XML makes it modern, right?<sarcasm>
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