Naked Objects

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

Naked Objects software construction Editors: Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas I The Pragmatic Programmers [email protected] I [email protected] Naked Objects Richard Pawson n a recent visit to Norway, I was oriented designs. The problem is that none served the customary lunch of open- of those practices is a bad habit; each was faced sandwiches. I don’t understand deliberately designed to overcome some ex- the logic of the open-faced sand- isting problem with software engineering. wich—all the work of preparing a Let’s look at an example. The argument O sandwich, but you still have to eat it for the Model-View-Controller pattern and with a knife and fork. Perhaps the Norwe- its close-relation, the Entity-Boundary-Con- gian that brought the idea of the sandwich troller pattern is that a given business object from overseas (our British tradition holds must be viewed on different platforms, in dif- that the Earl of Sandwich invented ferent contexts, and with different visual rep- it) simply lost the key instruction: resentations. Embedding knowledge of how place another slice of bread on top to create these different views in business ob- so that you can pick it up! jects would result in bloated objects with Some Norwegians might feel heavy duplication of functionality. Using the same way about what the rest MVC or EBC, the core business objects (that of the world did to one of their is, the Model or Entity objects, respectively) great ideas: object-orientation. have no knowledge of these different presen- Looking at most so-called object- tations. Dedicated presentation objects (that oriented software, you’d think the is, the View or Boundary objects) specify designers had never heard about what will appear in each view, and know the key idea: An object should how to create the visual display and accept model some aspect of the business domain— inputs from the user. Controller objects not just its attributes and associations—but all provide the glue between the two—populat- behaviors that might be required of it. This ing the views with attributes from the busi- behavioral completeness yields a big benefit, ness objects and invoking methods on those in that changes to the business domain map objects in response to user-initiated events. simply to changes in the software. Actually, However, there is a marked tendency for many designers intend to create behaviorally Controller objects to become an explicit complete objects, but just as milk degrades representation of business tasks, managing into curds and whey and salad dressing into the optimized sequence of activities and en- oil and vinegar, their software seems almost forcing appropriate business rules. In doing inevitably to separate into process and data. so, they usurp the business objects’ natural responsibilities. The presentation objects, Separating process and data meanwhile, often mix attributes from multi- Several years ago I determined to find out ple business objects. Before long, the Entity what caused this. My research identified or Model objects become the data represen- several common practices that encourage tation, and the Controller objects become the separation of process and data in object- the process representation. 0740-7459/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE July/August 2002 IEEE SOFTWARE 81 SOFTWAREDEPT CONSTRUCTION TITLE generic and some of which are object specific. These actions all correspond to methods on the business object. For a Customer object, specific actions in- clude Authenticate, Communicate, and RegisterNewChild. Some ac- tions perform simple operations on that object; others initiate more com- plex transactions. Users can also initiate behaviors by dragging and dropping objects on other objects, or into specific fields within objects. Dragging a Customer instance on the Child Benefit class would cause the system to check if that customer was already claiming child benefit. If not, the system initiates a new claim by creating an instance of the Child Benefit Scheme, insert- ing a reference to the Customer object inside it, and creating a new instance of Case to track the progress of this claim. The Case owner is the object Figure 1. A prototype for a new government benefits administration representing the Officer logged into system built using Naked Objects. All user actions consist of noun- the system. (The user could also per- verb style operations on core business objects. form each action individually and in a different order). The system also portrays the busi- Naked Objects for a new system, created using ness object classes directly. A win- Robert Matthews and I designed Naked Objects, to replace their exist- dow on the left lists the six primary Naked Objects, an open-source Java- ing Child Benefit Administration sys- business object classes that constitute based framework, to discourage pro- tem. That system is now in full-scale the system. Each class icon has a cess and data separation and to en- development and is near deployment. pop-up menu of class methods. courage business system creation Although the user interface differs These are mostly generic methods, from behaviorally complete objects. slightly from that shown here, the and include Naked Objects’ key idea is to directly prototype’s principles have been faith- expose the core business objects (such fully preserved. The new architecture, I Create a new instance of this class as Customer, Product, and Order) which mimics that of the Naked Ob- I Retrieve an existing instance from to the user. All user actions consist of jects framework but is tailored to the storage invoking a behavior directly on a DSCFA’s own technical environment, I List instances of this class that business object, either by selecting an will eventually replace all of their ex- match a set of criteria icon from a pop-up menu or dragging isting core business systems. I Show any subclasses that are an object and dropping it on another. Figure 1 shows several classes of available to the user There are no top-level menus, or any business objects including Customers forms or scripts sitting on the objects. (the mother and children involved in a Because there is no other mecha- The framework is so radical that it claim), Officers, Cases, Payments, nism with which users can initiate a does not even permit the creation of Communications, and Schemes (the business action, the programmers de- dialog boxes. various legislative schemes that the veloping an application are forced to DSCFA administers—only Child encapsulate all required behavior Applying the principles of Naked Benefit is included in this prototype), with the core business objects. How- Objects which are represented as icons. Users ever, because there is a 1:1 corre- One of the first organizations to can double click on any instance to spondence between the underlying apply the design principles embodied show an expanded view, or they can object model and the user interface, in Naked Objects is the Irish govern- drag it to the desktop to create a sepa- Naked Objects can auto-generate the ment’s Department of Social, Com- rate viewer. Right clicking on any in- latter from the former. Programmers munity, and Family Affairs. Figure 1 stance, in any context, produces a pop- do not need to write any user inter- shows a screenshot from a prototype up menu of actions, some of which are face code to develop a fully working 82 IEEE SOFTWARE July/August 2002 SOFTWAREDEPT CONSTRUCTION TITLE application using Naked Objects. in real time. Most approaches to rapid countered OO, and I’ve just realized Instead, at runtime the framework’s prototyping develop only the users’ how far it is from what we’ve actually generic viewing mechanism uses view of the system. Using Naked Ob- been doing.” Java’s reflection to identify objects’ jects we are prototyping the object Naked Objects is still in its in- behaviors and makes these available model simultaneously. With Naked fancy, but it is developing rapidly. We to the user. Programmers need only Objects, the conventional notion of have much that we still want to do follow a few simple conventions the user interface simply disappears— with the framework. We are starting when writing business objects in programmers don’t even consider a to get offers of help from others who Java. The Naked Objects framework user-interface because they don’t have are catching the vision. What pleases effectively provides the View and to develop one and users talk only us most is that the framework gets Controller roles in generic form— about the objects with which they simpler with every iteration. You can the programmer writes only the deal. read more about the design princi- Model objects. ples behind Naked Objects and Most early attempts at auto-gener- New generation of business systems download the Java framework from ating a user interface from an under- A handful of commercial organiza- www.nakedobjects.org. lying model, such as some application tions have already started to use Antoine de Saint Exupery wrote generators in the 1980s, produced Naked Objects to conceive a new gen- that “In anything at all, perfection is spectacularly poor user interfaces. eration of business systems. In each of finally achieved not when there is no Naked Objects does rather better. I these projects, the organization has longer anything to add, but when would not suggest that our user inter- stated that they have never seen such there is no longer anything to take faces are in any sense optimal, but positive communication between de- away, when a body has been stripped they are remarkably expressive and velopers and users during develop- down to its nakedness.” This princi- give users a strong sense of control— ment.
Recommended publications
  • Naked Objects: a Technique for Designing More Expressive Systems
    Naked objects: a technique for designing more expressive systems Richard Pawson Robert Matthews Computer Sciences Corporation NakedObjects.org and Computer Science Department, Tdnity College, Dublin, IE rpawson@csc;com ABSTRACT OOUIs provide a number of advantages to the user including Naked objects is an approach to systems design in which core reduced modality [6], and greater expressiveness for the user business objects show directly through to the user interface, and [10], and have become the norm for 'creative' applications such in which all interaction consists of invoking methods on those as drawing, computer aided design (CAD), page make-up and objects in the noun-verb style. One advantage of this approach multimedia editing. OOUIs are far less common in transactional is that it reaults in systems that arc more expressive from the business systems. This may be because the need for viewpoint of the user: they treat the user like a problem solver, expressiveness is less clear. It may also be because the not as merely a process-follower. Another advantage is that the underlying structure of most transactional business applications, 1:1 mapping between the user's representation and the comprising scripted procedures and data operations, does not underlying model means that it is possible to auto-generate the map well onto an OOUI. former from the latter, which yields benefits to the development Surprisingly, though, even where a transactional business process. The authors have designed a Java-based, open source system is based upon a true business object model, the core toolkit called Naked Objects which facilitates this style of business objects are typically hidden from the user.
    [Show full text]
  • Design Patterns Design Patterns
    Design Patterns CSC207 – Software Design Design Patterns • Design pattern: – A general description of the solution to a well- established problem using an arrangement of classes and objects. • Patterns describe the shape of code rather than the details. – There are lots of them in CSC 301 and 302. Loop patterns from first year • Loop pattern: – A general description of an algorithm for processing items in a collection. • All of you (hopefully) have some loop patterns in your heads. • You don’t really need to think about these any more; you just use them, and you should be able to discuss them with your fellow students. • Some first-year patterns: – Process List – Counted Loop – Accumulator – Sentinel Process list pattern • Purpose: to process every item in a collection where you don’t care about order or context; you don’t need to remember previous items. • Outline: • Example: • Other example: darken every pixel in a picture Counted loop pattern • Purpose: to process a range of indices in a collection. • Outline: • Example: • Other example: print indices of even-length string Accumulator pattern • Purpose: to accumulate information about items in a collection. • Outline: • Example: • Other examples: sum, min, accumulate a list of items meeting a particular criterion. Sentinel pattern • Purpose: to remove a condition in a loop guard. • Outline: • Example: Sentinel pattern, continued • Here is the code that Sentinal replaces; note that i != list.size() is evaluated every time through the loop, even though it is false only once. Design Pattern
    [Show full text]
  • Presentación De Powerpoint
    Software Architecture of Oviedoof University Modularity Science Computer of of Course 2018/2019 Jose E. Labra Gayo School Software Software School of Computer Science University of Oviedo Modularity Architecture Software Architecture of Oviedoof University Big Ball of Mud Modular decomposition Definitions Recommendations Modularity styles Layers Aspect Oriented decomposition Domain based decomposition Science Computer of of School Software Architecture Big Ball of Mud of Oviedoof Big Ball of Mud University Described by Foote & Yoder, 1997 Elements Lots of entities intertwined Constraints None Science Computer of of School Software Architecture Big Ball of Mud of Oviedoof Quality attributes (?) University Time-to-market Quick start It is possible to start without defining an architecture Incremental piecemeal methodology Solve problems on demand Cost Cheap solution for short-term projects Science Computer of of School Software Architecture Big Ball of Mud of Oviedoof Problems University High Maintenance costs Low flexibility at some given point At the beginning, it can be very flexible After some time, a change can be dramatic Inertia When the system becomes a Big Ball of Mud it is very difficult to convert it to another thing A few prestigious developers know where to touch Science Clean developers run away from these systems Computer of of School Software Architecture Big Ball of Mud of Oviedoof Some reasons University Throwaway code: You need an immediate fix for a small problem, a quick prototype or proof of concept When it is good
    [Show full text]
  • A Project to Model-Driven Development with Naked Objects and Domain-Driven Design
    Elihu: A Project to Model-Driven Development with Naked Objects and Domain-Driven Design Samuel Alves Soares1 and Mariela Ines´ Cortes´ 2 1Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceara,´ Taua,´ Ceara,´ Brazil 2State University of Ceara,´ Fortaleza, Ceara,´ Brazil Keywords: Model Driven Development, Naked Objects, Domain Driven Design, Domain Patterns, Design Patterns. Abstract: The model-driven development is a approach to creating software through well-defined models containing the information needed to generate the application. However, the software modeling in this approach requires the definition of application infrastructure artifacts in the model, such as user interface technologies and data persistence scheme, in order to transform modeling in final application. This makes the modeling complex, difficult to understand and maintain since new artifacts need to be added, failing to keep the focus on application business domain. To resolve this problem, we propose the Elihu project, a solution based on Naked Objects Pattern, Domain-Driven Design and software design patterns where the developer models just business objects and their characteristics related to the application domain. The full application is generated based on these software patterns and a Naked Objects Pattern framework is responsible for the application infrastructure code and the display of objects to users. The proposed solution benefits the creation of less complex models, that support evolution and modification of requirements along the development and the generation of full applications without manual intervention in the generated code. 1 INTRODUCTION 2006). On the other hand, the ambiguous nature of models and information redundancy along different The focus on the problem domain is pointed views of the same object make it difficult to maintain out as the ideal approach to the development of and make it difficult to adopt the MDD in the industry computer systems (Pawson, 2004).
    [Show full text]
  • Pawson Thesis.Pdf
    Naked objects A thesis submitted to the University of Dublin, Trinity College for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Richard Pawson, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, Dublin June 2004 1 Foreword by Trygve Reenskaug (Author’s note: Prof. Reenskaug was the external examiner for this thesis. One of the pioneers of object-oriented programming, he is best known as the inventor of the Model- View-Controller pattern. After the thesis was accepted, he generously agreed to write a foreword to the electronically-published version.) The world’s shipbuilding industry went through a heavy modernization program through the nineteen fifties and sixties. My colleague Kjell Kveim invented a control unit for the numerical control of machine tools such as flame cutters. The first unit was installed at the Stord shipyard in 1960 and opened the field for integrated computer aided design and manufacturing. The matching design system, Autokon, was first deployed at the Stord Yard in 1963. Autokon was subsequently adopted by most major shipyards around the world and was still in use by the late nineties. The purpose of Autokon was to empower the ship’s designers. It had a central database holding important information about the shape of the hull, the position of frames and decks, and the shapes of the parts. There was a language that permitted the designers to specify parts in shipbuilding terminology. There was a designer programming facility so that they could specify families of similar parts. Autokon was developed in close collaboration between shipbuilders and scientists. We considered ourselves as tool builders; the success criterion was that the tools should be handy, practicable, serviceable and useful.
    [Show full text]
  • Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects
    Extracted from: Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects This PDF file contains pages extracted from Domain-Driven Design, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf. For more information or to purchase a paperback or PDF copy, please visit http://www.pragprog.com. Note: This extract contains some colored text (particularly in code listing). This is available only in online versions of the books. The printed versions are black and white. Pagination might vary between the online and printer versions; the content is otherwise identical. Copyright © 2009 The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their prod- ucts are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial capital letters or in all capitals. The Pragmatic Starter Kit, The Pragmatic Programmer, Pragmatic Programming, Pragmatic Bookshelf and the linking g device are trademarks of The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC. Every precaution was taken in the preparation of this book. However, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages that may result from the use of information (including program listings) contained herein. Our Pragmatic courses, workshops, and other products can help you and your team create better software and have more fun. For more information, as well as the latest Pragmatic titles, please visit us at http://www.pragprog.com Copyright © 2009 Dan Haywood.
    [Show full text]
  • Object-Oriented Programming (VB Version)
    Object-Oriented Programming (VB version) by Richard Pawson v1.0.0 ©Richard Pawson, 2020. The moral right of the author has been asserted. This document is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The author is willing, in principle, to grant permission for distribution of derivative versions, on a case by case basis, and may be contacted as [email protected]. ‘Metal Up’ is a registered trademark, number UK00003361893. Author’s acknowledgements I am indebted to John Stout who has acted as a continuous reviewer throughout the writing of this book, offering many corrections and improvements to both text and program code. Responsibility for any remaining errors remains mine alone – please report any that you find to me as [email protected]. Foreword by Alan Kay In my first day in grad school in 1966, the head of the department gave me a thesis from just a few years earlier: “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Communications System” by Ivan Sutherland at MIT. It completely turned upside down my ideas about computing. It was not just the invention of interactive computer graphics, but also allowed the user to define complex “Ideas” — such as beams for a bridge, rivets, transistors, linkages, text characters, and much more — produce as many “instances” of each Idea as needed to make more complex assemblies (which could themselves be turned into Ideas) — then use goal-solving graphical programming to give the Ideas dynamic relationships and larger simulation behaviors. For example, you could define a beam as being like a stiff spring, use many instances of them to make a bridge, hang simulated weights from the bridge, and Sketchpad would dynamically compute the tensions and compressions on the beams and show these numerically — all without the system knowing anything about beams or bridges, or even the numeral forms for numbers ahead of time.
    [Show full text]
  • Architectural Styles and Patterns
    Architectural Styles and Patterns Wednesday 13 February 13 Architectural Patterns & Styles Consensus Controversy • Established • Philosophy (context- Solutions problem-solution vs components- Common • connections) vocabulary Granularity (vs Document • • Design patterns) Reason over quality • • Categorization Wednesday 13 February 13 Architectural Patterns (Wikipedia) • Presentation- abstraction- • Peer-to-peer control • Service-oriented • Three-tier architecture • Pipeline • Naked Objects Implicit Invocation • Model-View • Controller • Blackboard Wednesday 13 February 13 Architectural Patterns (Shaw & Garland) • Dataflow Systems -- Batch, Pipes and Filters • Call-and-return systems -- Main program and subroutines, OO systems, Hierarchical Layers • Independent components -- Communicating processes, Event systems • Virtual Machines -- Interpreters, Rule-based systems • Data-Centered Systems -- Databases, Hypertext systems Blackboards Wednesday 13 February 13 Elements of Architecture (Shaw & Garland) Components Connectors • Clients • Procedure calls • Servers • Events broadcast • Filters • Database protocols • Layers • Pipes • Databases - What are the structural patterns permitted? - What is the underlying computational model? - What are the invariants of the style? BUT ... - What are examples of its use? - What are the tradeoffs? - ... Wednesday 13 February 13 Architectural Patterns (Baas, Clements & Kazman) • Dataflow Systems -- Batch, Pipes and Filters • Data-Centered -- Repository, Blackboard • Virtual machine -- Interpreter, Rule-based
    [Show full text]
  • Object Thinking
    PUBLISHED BY Microsoft Press A Division of Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond, Washington 98052-6399 Copyright © 2004 by David West All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data pending. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 QWE 8 7 6 5 4 3 Distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn and Company Ltd. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Microsoft Press books are available through booksellers and distributors worldwide. For further information about international editions, contact your local Microsoft Corporation office or contact Microsoft Press International directly at fax (425) 936-7329. Visit our Web site at www.microsoft.com/mspress. Send comments to [email protected]. Microsoft, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Studio, and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. The example companies, organizations, products, domain names, e-mail addresses, logos, people, places, and events depicted herein are fictitious. No association with any real company, organization, product, domain name, e-mail address, logo, person, place, or event is intended or should be inferred. This book expresses the author’s views and opinions. The information contained in this book is provided without any express, statutory, or implied warranties.
    [Show full text]
  • Domain-‐Driven Design Reference
    Domain-Driven Design Reference Definitions and Pattern Summaries Eric Evans Domain Language, Inc. © 2015 Eric Evans This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ iv Definitions .............................................................................................................................. vi Pattern Language Overview .................................................................................................. vii I. Putting the Model to Work ......................................................................... 1 Bounded Context .................................................................................................................... 2 Ubiquitous Language ............................................................................................................... 3 Continuous Integration ........................................................................................................... 5 Model-Driven Design ............................................................................................................... 6 Hands-on Modelers ................................................................................................................. 7 Refactoring Toward Deeper Insight .......................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Formbuilder: a Novel Approach to Deal with View Development and Maintenance?
    FormBuilder: A Novel Approach to Deal with View Development and Maintenance? Tomas Cerny and Michael J. Donahoo 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Czech Technical University, Charles square 13, 121 35 Prague 2, CZ, [email protected] 2 Department of Computer Science, Baylor University, P.O. Box 97356, 76798-7356 Waco, TX, US, jeff [email protected] Abstract. In most web applications, the attributes of entity classes di- rectly determine the content of corresponding view forms. In addition, these entity classes often encapsulate constraints on associated proper- ties. For example, a User entity class may have an email property with constraints on the form of the address; consequently, the view form for creating/updating users should include an email field and perform val- idation on the submitted data. Unfortunately, view form development is often done manually, an error-prone and tedious process. Form error detection is particularly difficult because the errors only manifest them- selves at runtime because of weak type safety and limited mechanisms for constraint verification. In addition, entity modification may cause incon- sistency with the corresponding form. In this paper, we propose a new tool, FormBuilder, which automates the development and maintenance of view forms. The application of this tool in production applications has repeatedly demonstrated the practical contribution of this approach. Keywords: Code-generation, Form development, Client-side validation 1 Introduction Enterprise application development often builds on a 3-tier architecture [1], object-oriented programming (OOP) [1] [2] and at some point utilizes model-view- controller (MVC) pattern [2] to design application with user interface flexible towards changes in layout and application logic.
    [Show full text]
  • Short Studies 2008: Adventures in Diamond Strategies of Change(S) a Collection of Essays
    Summer-Edition 2017 — vordenker-archive — Rudolf Kaehr (1942-2016) Title Short Studies 2008: Adventures in Diamond Strategies of Change(s) A Collection of Essays Archive-Number / Categories 2_36 / K06 Publication Date 2008 Keywords Diamond Strategies, Polycontexturality, Web Mobility, Education, Second-Order Epistemology Disciplines Abstract Modular Bolognese Paradoxes of postmodern education. A Tale of Fishes, Birds and Diamonds in Second-Order Epistemology Why it is useless to write about the mono-contexturality of alphabetism and digitalism Chez Maxime's Human rights in a polycontextural world Primary Thoughts to a Manifesto for Awareness Fashion Marketing Which Equality? How equal are equal human beings? Generalized Diamonds From monosemic to tectonic complementarity Diamond Disremption Diamond interpretation of the kenomic succession operation Diamond Web2.0? How social is social networking? Web Mobility Web computing between semiotic and kenomic spaces Double Cross Playing Diamonds Understanding interactivity in/between bigraphs and diamonds Morphogrammatics of Change A monomorphy based sketch of morphogrammatic transformations Citation Information / How to cite Rudolf Kaehr: "Short Studies 2008: Adventures in Diamond Strategies of Change(s)", www.vordenker.de (Sommer Edition, 2017) J. Paul (Ed.), URL: http://www.vordenker.de/rk/rk_Short-Studies_Diamond-Strategies-of-Change_2008.pdf Categories of the RK-Archive K01 Gotthard Günther Studies K08 Formal Systems in Polycontextural Constellations K02 Scientific Essays K09 Morphogrammatics K03 Polycontexturality – Second-Order-Cybernetics K10 The Chinese Challenge or A Challenge for China K04 Diamond Theory K11 Memristics Memristors Computation K05 Interactivity K12 Cellular Automata K06 Diamond Strategies K13 RK and friends K07 Contextural Programming Paradigm From the SelectedWorks of Rudolf Kaehr 2008 Short Studies 2008.
    [Show full text]