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A Conversation With Creator’s Creator


By Allen Holub
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October 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 3)
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my disappointment with Sun’s Studio Creator. My main problem is Creator’s flavor of model-view-controller, which puts a straitjacket on the tool, preventing you from using a more flexible (and more object-oriented) UI architecture, such as Presentation Abstraction Control. The net effect of this tight coupling it that your Creator application is doomed to a life of difficult maintenance because the UI is too tightly coupled to both the underlying database and to the implementation of the application-level classes. (I should say that the real flaw is the JSF framework that underlies Creator—most of the commonly used UI frameworks, including JSF and Struts, are not particularly well thought out.)

Well, Sun called me up to arrange an interview with Craig McClanahan, Studio Creator’s architect. Interestingly, the software we used during the interview was as interesting as the interview itself—more on that in a moment. McClanahan’s motive was to prove to me that I could do what I wanted to do using Creator. In fact, you can get about halfway there, but I’m still not sold.

In the most successful systems I’ve written, the objects that constituted the “business logic” were responsible for creating that part of the user interface that represented their own state. Think of it as if every object has a “display yourself” method. (That’s obviously not how a real system works—real systems use things like the Gang-of-Four “Builder” design pattern to separate business and representation logic, and they can represent attributes of themselves with finer granularity—but it’s a good conceptual model.)

Studio Creator’s main flaw is that you must lay out widgets on the screen and then hook those widgets up to the object. If the object’s implementation changes, then all of the infrastructure that hooks up the object to the widget is now broken. I, on the other hand, want all changes to an object to be localized in a single place—ideally a single class definition and its inner classes. If the class definition changes, the UI should scale automatically. Studio Creator won’t do that because that’s not the way model-view-controller works.




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