Technology: February 2004 Archives

This via Cafe au Lait: the Abstract User Interface Markup Language which, according to IBM, lets you design a UI once and then deploy it as either a thin client via a servlet based rendering engine, or as a thick client via a Swing based UI (why not SWT one may ask). This sounds a lot like the functionality that Next/Apple have had for years with Web Objects.

Personally, I’m not too sure about the whole idea, I think that if you’re designing an essentially forms-based application then thin clients are fine, anything else really needs a real user interface (read: thick client). Any tool which tries to build both from a single description is going to either create a way too complicated and slow web experience or a dismally poor client application.

Well, I mentioned this many a time whilst I was consulting at Three as being something that they should definitely offer, but it seems like Vodafone have beaten them to it. They announced a few days ago that they’d soon be offering 3G data services throughout pretty much most of Europe.

Looks like 3 could soon be a thing of the past, I really don’t fancy their chances in the marketplace now the big V is moving in.

From a Salon interview with Ellen Ullman:

When you’re around really serious professional programmers, this code jockey stuff really falls away, and there is a recognition that the best programmers spend a lot of time thinking first, and working out the algorithms on paper or in their heads, at a white board, walking.

Is this one of the reasons why test driven development is successful? It forces you to take a step back and consider the problem in a greater level of detail before you start writing code. If it’s not the main reason then I think it’s a large influencing factor. Several of the XP practices exhibit this behaviour (more thinking, less typing) in fact, despite it’s name. Take pair programming, if you’re forced to work with somebody and explain what you are doing then you are forced to think about your work at least to the level of articulating your thoughts to another.

A minor annonyance with peoples CSS: having an onMouseOver effect that causes the enclosing paragraph to reflow when you move the mouse over it. The common culprit is changing the background colour of the surrounding box and, I assume, failing to take into account insets and borders correctly.