Tim Almond

I was reading this week about Microsoft’s new XAML technology, Sparkle, and it got me thinking about GUI design tools, object orientation and programming in general. This is not about IDEs. Tools which provide management, editing, debugging and cross-referencing can be very useful.

One of the dangers with GUI design tools is that they give a false hope - that being able to drop form widgets with a mouse to show the form layout will revolutionise productivity. They do help for simple forms, no doubt. But, the complexity of desktop applications is fundamentally about the code behind - the form validation and the database interface. And once built, the vast majority of changes will be in this area, not changes to the GUI. Having something to do your form positioning will only afford you a little time.

The other issue is to do with OO programming. If you have a form with dynamically created controls, based on data, with each being an instance of a class, how do you graphically represent that? Simply, you can’t. The "designer" mode can give you no clue about this. You have to know that it’s sitting somewhere in the code. You can build some sort of half-built form, but it probably creates as much confusion as not using it at all.

They may also do more harm than good. GUIs may abstract the code from the programmer, which takes them away from exploring possibilities like abstracting their code into classes for the form objects.

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Tags: Software Development //