Notes from a small field

The paragraph about the user interface generator in my last post, or my other recent attempt to explain what it does, don’t really tell you very much. I hope this quick festive example provides a better idea about how user modeling and code generation can speed up user interface development.

First I needed to think of something Christmassy that might need a simple user interface. I apologise in advance, but I chose Christmas cracker jokes!! On the plus side, they’re really simple, and a basic create, read, update and delete interface makes perfect sense. So, I got started by creating a CRUD Joke UML diagram… and about five minutes later I stopped laughing to myself! Well, it’s funnier than most cracker jokes!

Anyway, the UML tools we provide for user modeling enable you to create a new user object with the default CRUD tasks in one go. Here’s what it looks like:

Next, because the user modeling is focused on the roles and goals of users, I added a few other bits just for the demo:

Perhaps a better role would have been, “Joke quality monitor”, with a goal of, “Maximise Christmas laughter”… or should that be minimise… well, you get the idea!

That’s pretty much it, I can then click the “Generate User Interface…” menu option, deploy the EAR it creates to an application server and fire up my web browser. It took longer to get this far through the blog post than it did to get a working user interface (admittedly I’m a very slow writer, but still, I think that’s pretty good).

(Thanks to a very old BBC article for that joke!)

The activity diagram behind the modify task above looks like this:

At some point you need to put real code in for the commands to interact with the back end system, whatever that might be, but to start with the tool will generate a default implementation so you can quickly prototype and test the UI.

So that’s all there is to creating cracking user interfaces.