Re: Crazy Lack of Sleep thought - Generic UI module

On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, Michael Cummings wrote:

> --- Matt Sergeant <[email protected]> wrote:
> > You could use XWT (http://www.xwt.org) in
> > combination with server side
> > XSLT (e.g. AxKit) to deliver to both HTML and GUI
> > clients in a cross
> > platform manner. Is that the sort of thing you were
> > thinking of? Or does
> > it have to be generated directly from perl?
> >
>
> My thought was more geared to a perl based solution
> (i'll be honest - its the language i'm most familiar
> with). Ideally, something that you could just plug in
> your desired interface type in the init sequence and
> the rest of your code would be fine. Kind of an
> inspiration (again, probable cause of inspiration no
> sleep) was the DBI module where you have the unique
> string to connect to your database (csv, postgres,
> mysql, for example), but the rest of your code is
> genericly handled by the module such that the only
> line you need to worry about is that init. I confess,
> I haven't thought this through too far - there would
> be definite limitations, at least for me at first, in
> getting the different pieces working similarly (for
> example, a popup function acting similarly between the
> different UI types).

Part of the problem of this sort of generic thing is it's a pipe dream,
pure and simple. Many many people have come before you thinking the exact
same thing - you should be able to write a generic application and have
the UI just "work". But it doesn't, because different UI models have very
different requirements. A simple example might be how much information you
can enter before you can do a server request - a Palm app can do a
different amount to a Web app, and to a desktop app. Plus in the end,
there's always a need to "tweak" the UI.

I think a better aim is to focus on separating your content from
presentation by building an API to build your app on top of, then writing
"views" for different user interfaces is relatively simple.

-- 
<!-- Matt -->
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