Trust Your Vendor for Your UI Render
Let me be clear in this American world ruled by Fox News: I am actually looking for authentic views against what “I believe in.” I’m out pounding the carpet chatting up the occupants in the cubicles, searching for disagreement. My mama loved me so I don’t need much fake kindness from strangers. So the search is for opinions against my current RESTafarian focus. The focus is on XML-based small talk among my components, where the messages are sent to locations instead of objects. The focus is on using XML-based technologies for declarative UI design. So my RESTafarian focus is biased toward XML over HTTP.
The most viable argument so far against my current RESTafarian focus is the promise that technology in Java Server Faces and ASP.NET can render a new user interface on the fly. It’s the famous Web-browser-to-WAP-Phone scenario from the early part of this century. I’m being unkind when I refer to the WAP phone—because WAP is not that popular right now. I’m not certain of the details but I hear tell that it ain’t working out. The path followed by me would force me to write a new XSLT (or something) to handle different devices. This manual labor seems useless to my contrarians. My focus on ‘vendor independent’ XSLT means that I’m forced to build a UI interface for every possible client on the planet. I’ve effectively traded UI independence for this vendor independence.
Another alternative view to mine is what Google has in the form of the Google Web Toolkit. This deserves investigation for the promise that the cost of working in “pure objects” does not mean making a commitment to what Microsoft calls “Server Controls.” People who use JSF and ASP.NET (the way Scott Guthrie wants you to) are making a confident statement of commitment to their vendor. They are also saying that any custom UI work that gets locked in to JSF or ASP.NET is a non-issue. I envy such heartfelt optimism! Hey, dude, can I borrow 50 bucks?
Experience informs me that custom UI work is the most time-consuming part of application development. To voluntarily lock this work up in the realm of one vendor does not seem prudent to me. This is (to me) why Microsoft is moving from Windows Forms to Windows Presentation Foundation. This is why Adobe is moving from Flash to Flex. Both of these technologies are driven by XML declarations. These form UI assets that are (possibly) one XSL transform away from moving to another platform. Of course Microsoft or Adobe ‘moving from’ Windows forms or Flash may be the wrong words. We can be less unkind and say these are ‘additions’ and ‘alternatives.’