News: Massive Construction Methodology with new "Carrier" tool
Carrier is a new kind of IDE in which both programming developers and non-programming designers are capable of composing fully functional web applications with rich user interfaces and also capable of collaboration with each other completely on Internet. It supports the Massive Construction Methodology with the so called 3C models:
- Posted by: Jing Zhou
- Posted on: February 24 2004 02:11 EST
Collaboration Model - empowering average users with its code-free design capability.
Construction Model - visualizing MVC metadata blocks with minimum required artifaces.
Conversion Model - transitioning all artifacts to any other desired forms in batch mode.
In the Carrier architecture paper http://www.netspread.com/architecture.html a BEA's sample J2EE application Avitek Medical Records is rebuilt on Carrier with 70% code size reduction and enormous artifact reductions. In the contact page http://www.netspread.com/contact.html the rational that leads to the abstraction jump as well as the its legitimacy is discussed in details. In the end, the component models and APIs are left into a lower layer and an emerging playing field is introduced. The persistence mechanism should be enhanced to support a much simpler Dependency Transfer facility. The web services should be enhanced to support the exposures of user interfaces not just APIs. The web sites should be able to refactor themselves in a similar concept to refactor Java source codes today. To find out these exciting concepts, visit http://www.netspread.com and see web applications run on Carrier Wheels. The group has built hundreds of sample web applications based on the MVC metadata blocks with signficant productivity jumps.
- Another web framework then ? by David Waddell on February 26 2004 04:16 EST
- Another web framework then ? (cont) by David Waddell on February 26 2004 04:23 EST
- Terminology looks quite bizzar by Anton Tagunov on February 26 2004 10:35 EST
- See Tips on Whees and Struts for Better Understanding by Jing Zhou on February 26 2004 11:53 EST
Maybe because it's early morning, or because I'm dazed from looking
at the falling snow outside (don't see it that often in Belfast), but
I didn't glean much from this article except some nicely crafted
terminology - Massive, Hyper, Wheels etc.
There's talk of a web tier that is based on metadata blocks
"an extension of the Struts action mapping"; and of a business tier
and persistence tier based written in ejbs.
So what exactly is being offered here ? Another MVC framework for the
" What we find is amazing: virtually all web applications can be built exclusively on the MVC metadata blocks "
This ia amazing as struts and preceding MVC frameworks never presented this possibility ?
There also talk of storing all the config in a database, freeing us from the
pain of context relative paths. I've never really found context relative paths a pain (you have to locate things somehow - hence URL). Storing config in a database is not necessarily making life easier - to run with this framework you need a database de facto. What is wrong with a file system - or at least offer the choice.
So my main question is - what does Massive Construction do for me that can't be achieved already with existing frameworks ? From my brief reading, all I can see is a rehash of existing knowledge and imposed limitations.
Not meaning to discourage anyone who is building tools for building web applications visually, but the terminology in these two articles referenced in the post is VERY difficult to grasp. It's all non-standard. And the authors aver EXTREMELY fond of making LONG names for their concepts, like "form controller model" (which actually seems to be the "controller" in the MVC triad), "form bean model", "form view model" (maybe these are "model" and "view" from MVC? But then what is the "hyper form bean" wrapped inside "hyper action event"?). Also the usage of word "declarative" seems not to conform to its usual meaning (borrowed for instance from EJB spec). Also to much hype to my taste.
The following link leads to tips with a lot of screen shots illustrating the way how the MVC metadata blocks are composed to build web user interfaces:
Carrier is not intended to give you another MVC framework as it is based on the Struts framework. What it does that can't be achieved with existing frameworks is the following features, primarily due to its code-free capabilities:
* Live web forms can be composed completely on Internet by non-programming professionals, such as school teachers. (See Carrier Designer's Guide)
* Sophisticated CRUD operations can be composed without coding. See tips 16 - 20 and the Ant Project demo with 39 blocks. No frameworks can do that to my knowledge.
* Because mass designers are working on Internet, the file systems/context relative paths must be abstracted away from the designers' point of view. When you have 20000 JSP pages as your mass documents on-line, relocating (or changing the relationships of) these JSP pages is just a simple SQL statement issued to your database because everything (the MVC metadata blocks) is stored in tables or xml database.
* The hyper form models can be visually composed which can hold other hyper form bean models. See tip 7 or the MedRec2 sample application.
There are a lot of other features, such as the phased validation model, see tips 3- 5. The file upload/download can also be visually composed, again no coding is the primary difference than any other frameworks and it does not intend to be a framework at all.