Tag: SOA

User Mental Models

I've spent the last 6 weeks looking into an interesting paradigm called Data, Context & Interaction (DCI). I've written a few introductory papers, and some tools too. DCI has the following goals: To improve the readability of object-oriented code by giving system behavior first-class status; To cleanly separate code for rapidly changing system behavior (what the system does) from that for slowly changing domain knowledge (what the system is), instead of combining both in one class interface; To help programmers reason about system-level state and behavior instead of only object state and behavior; To support an object style of thinking that is close to peoples' mental models, rather than the class style of thinking that overshadowed object thinking early in the history of object-oriented programming languages. The problem recognised by this paradigm is that system behaviour gets fragmented in traditional OOP, over a large number of classes and sub-classes. The code directly related to a use-case gets fragmented and "lost". The boundaries for the behaviour end up being class boundaries and pieces of behaviour are stuck with the data on which they operate, so that the code has high cohesion. If you want to read the code related to a use-case, you will struggle to extract it and understand it. I agree with these problems, but have not really encountered them personally for a long time, because I do most of my work predominantly in the SOA paradigm. When I first read these goals and all the articles I could…

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White Papers

I have just uploaded two papers: Agile Software Development of Service Oriented Architectures, Business Process Models and Enterprise Service Buses Service Oriented Architecture Strategies They can be downloaded from: http://www.maxant.ch/white-papers

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