I tend to agree with you Adam, I miss the interactivity of Drag and Drop UI's. I have never been a fan of web based UI's because of the simple fact of the sense of exploratory loss. I think a multi window web front end would be very beneficial. Standard web front ends to me have always provided a flattened feel to applications.
Jason Richardson National Payments Service (NPS) Technical Lead -----Original Message----- From: Adam Howard [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2012 1:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Introduction and another viewer Hello list, ======================================= This got kind of long. See link [4] for the good stuff. ======================================= Naked Objects is something I keep coming back to every few years. All of my work experience is with sovereign applications so the concerns that the pattern addresses are very natural to me. I started reading Dan's book last fall and made it part way through the carserv example app using Isis 0.1.2-incubating. I used the DnD viewer almost exclusively, enjoying how tangible the objects became using the multi-window interface. About a month ago I came back to the book and decided to start writing my own little app alongside carserv. I grabbed the latest Isis quickstart archetype (0.2.0-incubating) and started coding. Surprisingly, I saw that the DnD viewer was no longer included as standard in the archetype. I used the HTML viewer for about a week but it just didn't feel the same. With the DnD viewer I could look at my object representations and it would help drive my modeling. "Oh, I need a relationship here so I can drop this object on that one." This got me wondering. Could a browser-based multi-window interface be built on top of the JSON viewer and a javascript ui library? I looked at all the contenders (YUI, jQuery, MooTools, Backbone, ExtJS) and finally settled on jQuery after seeing this blog post [1] and looking at the jqMobile example. I've been playing with it for the past couple weeks and I'm at the point where I wanted to know if this is something the community is interested in. I know it's ANOTHER viewer and I'm making no claims that it's ready (or will ever be ready) for anyone else to use. I'm really asking if the ideas embodied in the DnD viewer are still desired? The most important to me being multiple objects on a virtual desktop that you can visually layout to increase understanding. All of the latest developments I've seen, both in Isis and NakedObject.NET, have centered on single-object view web layouts. Was it discovered that the desktop metaphor viewers were lacking for some users? The new web viewers are great but they don't give me the same sense of exploration as the original GUI. Maybe that exploration isn't needed after the model solidifies and the app is being used. Anyway, sorry for rambling. I tried something new and posted my little app on Heroku. If I understand the service right you can access the JSON viewer [2], the HTML viewer [3] and my "windowed" viewer [4] at the urls below. It might take a few seconds to spool up. Credentials are sven/pass. Tested in Chrome, FF, and Safari. Again it's nowhere near complete but you can execute actions, view objects and collections, create objects and modify properties (mostly.) Thanks for creating a wonderful framework to build on. -- Adam Howard [1] http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/creating-a-windows-like-interface-with-jquery-ui/ [2] http://simple-dusk-6870.herokuapp.com [3] http://simple-dusk-6870.herokuapp.com/htmlviewer [4] http://simple-dusk-6870.herokuapp.com/services.html This electronic message contains information generated by the USDA solely for the intended recipients. Any unauthorized interception of this message or the use or disclosure of the information it contains may violate the law and subject the violator to civil or criminal penalties. If you believe you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.
