Java: 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.

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.