[Sigia-l] FW: GUI Object Asset Management

[Listera]

"David Heller" wrote:

> I'm sure someone w/ your mxed bag of skills could build this in a couple of
> weeks, 

Since a few people asked me about how to build something like what David is
after, I thought I'd sketch out the basics here, as it also outlines how to
build prototypes.

What David wants is a basic CRUD app that Creates, Retrieves, Updates and
Deletes records, which in this case display GUI widgets.
 
So there are essentially 4 web pages to design:

1.  Entry   [form]  (new GUI widget record)
2.  Search  [form]  (for GUI items)
3.  List    [linked list]   (search result of GUI items)
4.  Detail  (selected individual GUI item)

The flow is Search -> List -> Detail. (#4 could/should be an external window
to be able to compare multiple GUI items.)

So what does a person who can design the forms/pages but can't program the
rest of it do?

Well, design the pages in something like Dreamweaver and get someone, in
this case, with minimal scripting and DB skills to a) create a couple of
tables in something like mySQL and b) bind the objects and Submit buttons on
David's beautifully crafted pages to the DB with, in this case, minimal
business logic.

This shouldn't take much more than a couple of hours (this is not
Documentum, David:-) and you're done.

If we generalize from this, this is also how you create fully functional
prototypes, which, if you're not tried of listening to me, is the principal
'deliverable' the design team should be handing over to developers.

That is, you design the CRUD pages in an authoring app and then entice
scripted/DB guy to do the binding for, say, World Series tickets or a gift
certificate for 100 or so of his favorites songs at iTunes Music Store. If
you watch what he does in Dreamweaver in connecting to the DB, and binding
objects to table columns, etc., you may actually try one day to do it
yourself as well. Complicated schemas may be hard, but simple ones like this
are within everyone's reach.

----
Ziya

Good judgment comes from experience
and experience comes from bad judgment.