Back Seat Driven Development

'PJW' on Wed, 09 May 2007 23:05:48 GMT, sez:

So you want a reversible GLR parser? If a working implementation was released today, closed source, I think you would have to wait a long time for the price to come down to 80 dollars.

'lb' on Wed, 09 May 2007 23:20:45 GMT, sez:

@pjw -- not 80 dollars -- 8 dollars ;-)

'Dylan Bennett' on Thu, 10 May 2007 05:38:07 GMT, sez:

Ha! I came to the site from my RSS reader just to see if anyone had mentioned *ahem* those red... train... platform... things... *ahem* only to find your note about banning. Nice. :)

'Karthik' on Thu, 10 May 2007 13:10:12 GMT, sez:

I've actually seen this done before...a model and view which pro actively responded to changes on the database. It was a custom CMS app written using ASP.NET and SQL Server. I can see the value in such a system, but I think there are way too many devs out there that would not want the data to affect the view without any human intervention.

'Helen' on Thu, 10 May 2007 15:24:28 GMT, sez:

Australian dollars or american dollars?

'Steve Campbell' on Thu, 10 May 2007 17:04:00 GMT, sez:

The reason we drive from a single place is because that is the place which has a certain amount of valuable information. You cannot drive from another place because to do so would imply that that other place has the same valuable information, plus more (because otherwise what's its purpose). Thus that place would be the better driver, and you could not have been driving from the first place to begin with.

Rinse, repeat, recurse, catch-22 chickens and 21 eggs.

'lb' on Thu, 10 May 2007 21:24:50 GMT, sez:

@Karthik: "would not want the data to affect the view without any human intervention"

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
You'd need the 'flow rules' to be easily revised, to sometimes ask for confirmation, sometimes to just show what they've pushed to where (and let you undo the symptom, without undoing the cause). Wise defaults are important, and a flexible review process.

@Karthik: "a model and view which pro actively responded to changes on the database"

I'd like to see that. Though, I think that it wouldn't begin to be useful until it was really really good.

@Helen:
let's say: hong kong dollars. ;-)

@Steve: "Rinse, repeat, recurse, catch-22 chickens and 21 eggs."
Love it.

'lb' on Thu, 10 May 2007 21:28:34 GMT, sez:

@Steve: "The reason we drive from a single place..."

But in a car, do we really drive from a single place? For one thing, we put 'rear vision' mirrors all over the car. Second -- if you're using a GPS navigation unit, then you're also employing a bird's eye view of the local area.

It's strange, but we tend to drive from one main place, with info from other places too.

'Andrew Shepherd' on Thu, 17 May 2007 21:18:43 GMT, sez:

We've written a code generator that creates an .XSD file from a schema, and then we automatically generate a .NET dataset from this, and then plug a DataGrid into that.
The resulting user interface is semi-useful for what we use it for (an in-house testing tool) and would be absolutely useless in the hands of a non-developer.

If a client application is a mirror of the database, then you have at least one of two things: a really crap user interface, or a woeful database design that doesn't support multiple users.

I'll just make the sweeping statement that code generating the user interface from the database, or vice versa, will never be possible for a professional looking end-user application. At least not possible in a way that's actually useful.

But hey, you've saved eight dollars!

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