On Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003, at 18:48 Europe/Rome, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
http://blog.xesoft.com/jon.lipsky/blog/Java/ ?permalink=workflow_viewlets.html
did you guys ever programmed java with JavaStudio? it was a nice little app that sun released in the early java days. it was visual programming of java code thru LabView style drag-drop-link of javabeans.
Yep. Sugar candy appealing to lusers like myself. :-)
It was sooooooo cool when you saw a demo.
Horrible to work with it.
why? visual programming is bullshit.
It take half an hour to write a visual representation of something like
if (blah) { dothis(); } else { dothat(); }
Still, I found the demos pretty valuable with the process variables being explicitely being created in a separate pane. Makes one think more about what he is doing.
The nice thing of such a GUI is that it enforces people to make use of the exposed API, and makes hacks around it, reaching for areas where scripting authors shouldn't come, a bit more difficult.
- 0 -
I just had a discussion in the car with Bruno about where Apples is heading (basically he bringing me uptodate - thank you Bruno), and my layman's conclusion is that different schools of development style are emerging when building webapps with Cocoon.
1) glueing together ready-made available components using XSPs and the bag of available Actions
2) Actions and custom Avalon-Cocoon components, which tend to overload the sitemap with programmatic constructions in the long run
3) 'Webcontinuations flow with Javascript', where people depend on the availability of Javascript wrappers for common libraries (JDBC, OR frameworks, ...) - with the challenge of coming up with decent JS libraries to make sure one doesn't have to reach at too many Java stuff using 'Packages' - the really cool thing is of course the instant gratification of save/reload/test
4) 'Apples' which shifts the encapsulation of business and service components back to full-blown Java, with a simple Apple class calling upon them while exposing flow decisions in a very lighweight manner in order to call the correct pipelines
5) 'Dywel' which seems to be going after Struts practices with a nice dash of Avalonization to go with that
3) and 4) being heavily dependent on the JXTransformer approach (which is a Good Thing IMHO)
How we are going to manage and support these five schools of thought, I honestly don't know (not even if we need to be worried altogether), but I envision some some white-bearded guy is already chuckling in his corner (http://strongbrains.com/images/darwin.jpg)
<interlude advise="don't take this too seriously">
More stupidity being put forward, I would humbly suggest to explicitely name the methodologies:
1) 'Barbara', in kind remembrance of B. Post
2) 'Carsten, the Early Years'
3) 'SchemoVidiuChrismatron'
4) 'Species' - since Apples and Pears are way to generic already, and it's what Darwin was all about
5) 'Rag' - since Dywel really sounds like a mop in Dutch if slightly misspelled
... in order to be able to ask a Cocoonie: what religion are you in? "Oh, I used to be an early CultofBarbara groupie, but now I tend to worship the mighty SchemoVidiuChrismatron."
</interlude>
Kidding aside, is my categorization more or less correct? Might be cool to put on a slide once.
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
