Re: BlackBox guide for Dummies: Proposition

From: [at]} <Bob>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 12:41:02 +0000

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Hi Bart,

> Let me know if this is a good idea, plus any general ideas about the
> contents (approach etc.) you'd like to propose at this stage.

this is a good idea, I think, but may be difficult to carry out.

A useful approach might be to decide on some 'model problems'
covering different domains, and lead the reader through the
development process using BB.
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~Compose/html/ModProb/

We could perhaps choose something like the well-known University
Library Problem, or the Japanese Sake Warehouse Problem, and show how
to develop such a system using BB. This would cover small but fairly
realistic business software problems and demonstrate well the
separation between layers: storage/persistence, 'business logic' and
user interface. It should be feasible to produce at least 2 each of
the storage & UI layers to show how they can be mixed and matched
easily.

For instance, we should be able to write an SQL storage layer and a
conventional flat-file layer which are easily interoperable &
interchangeable; we should also be able to write a GUI layer and, say,
a 'command line' layer which are interchangeable with each other and
also interoperable with the different persistence layers. For my own
education I have been working on some experiments along these lines,
although they are not at the moment in a form I would display in public,
nor have I written any documentation.

It would also be nice to write an interchangeable browser-based UI,
but I have not done anything like that in BB. This would be something
that operates as a servlet, unpacks the string from the browser,
calls the business logic, then formats the output as XML or HTML and
gives it back to the browser.

Something like that would cover over 90% of business software
developments, in my experience. It fails to exploit many of the
important features of Blackbox, so it would leave many parts of the
framework unexplained. However, there are some features which
end-users like very much and expect in a modern GUI, but which BB does
not provide as standard. The screamingly obvious one to me is iconic
toolbars. So it might be useful to develop such a thing and use that as
a guide to the particular parts of BB that it explores.

Of course, BB is for many other domains, but a similar approach to those
domains might be productive: choose a manageably small, but realistic
and well-known, model problem, and document a development project using
Blackbox.

If we went ahead with a documentation project then we would need to
decide who our audience was. I work in commercial data-processing,
where nobody, and I mean nobody, has heard of Oberon or its
derivatives. Yet, properly handled, BB could have a big market there
because of its simplicity and ease-of-use. Most people working in
business IT development do not want to read about the kind of
problems that are of interest to computer scientists and physicists,
they want to be able to write EPOS, order-entry, property management
and such-like systems. If BB is ever to go head-to-head with stuff
like Java in that world then it needs realistic examples and
instructions in how to develop business software.

-- 
Regards,
 Bob
p.s. I hate '...for Dummies'! Let us flatter our readers rather than
insult them. The Intelligent Programmer's Guide to Blackbox.
I also note that computer books are useful in inverse proportion to
their size. '...for Dummies' books are usually very thick indeed.
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Received on Wed Jan 21 2004 - 13:41:02 UTC