On Sep 30, 2008, at 4:31 PM, Michael Bayer wrote:
> im pretty pessimistic on the "generically expose any model through a > GUI" idea since its as old as toast, and I've never seen an actual > real world application using it successfully. At best, you'll see it > in some arcane "builder" types of systems which are designed to be > used by developers in the first place (and are generally just a PITA > versus textual coding). > > Other than that, humans want to interact with an interface designed > for humans. This is why we have the "view". I tend to agree with you, but unfortunately both sides of this coin are PITAs. MVC is nice and dandy, but in an RIA you end up having to manage two MVC infrastructures, one on the server and one on the client. The chain for a change in an actual ui view to be persisted on the application storage can be as convoluted as (and this is only in one direction): view -> model/controller -> client-to-server transport -> controller -> model -> storage. And, often but not always, the client-side models are really similar to the server-side models. The result is a frustrated feeling of a lot of repeated code between the ui and the the server. This repetition may be physically necessary (as the two sides are usually running different technologies e.g. js/ actionscript and python) but some automation may help, albeit it may not be appropriate in all cases. Yes, the idea is old, so much so that there seems to be a number of commercial products thriving out there. For the case of flex/ actionscript adobe has LifeCycle Data Services; there is also a product called WebORB that primarily also targets flex but seems to also have some js support, here's a small ajax example from their site: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/examples/phonebook.htm All these systems have their own level of complexity, cost and convolution. Worse, none of them offer the luxuries of having (a) python on the server-side and (b) an ORM as rich as sqlalchemy. Making the middle-layer(s) harder to develop will not help the "view" any. Bad user interfaces are just what they are but imho that is a separate problem altogether. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
