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At my company we are undertaking a large task of creating a new software architecture for our products. Our current architecture has been in use for many product iterations and lasted a long life and it is time for it to retire. The UI architecture is currently implemented in WTL/ATL 3.0 and COM.
We have just completed the design of the back end architecture, one that will stand the test of time as its predecessor has. However UI technologies move so fast that no one on our team has the expertise that I would consider required to lay a foundation that should last many years. We are currently targeting WPF for this architecture and considering various alternative strategies to help our lack of expertise with this technology.
Some approaches we are considering:
Have our experienced staff ramp up on WPF and work through an architecture -
Concern with this approach is that the areas we need our UI layer to last and likely all of the learning’s required will not be gained until after many products have been implemented using this architecture.
Bring in temporary expertise from a consulting firm to assist with the architecture and development - This approach is looking promising; suggestions on firms with expertise? Microsoft does not provide application and architecture consultants, so finding someone with the necessary expertise may prove challenging.
Bring in a consulting firm for an architecture study and guidance session - Seems to be compelling as would provide our experience staff guidance while still allowing our domain knowledge to steer the direction of the architecture. May be difficult to find firms qualified for this type of service.
My question then to you is how have you resolved a similar situation where you must create a robust, rich, long stay architecture utilizing new technologies that your team does not presently have architect level knowledge of? Have you had success with any of the previously mentioned strategies, or are there other approaches I have missed completely?
In general I am not an advocate for working in this capacity with technologies that are unfamiliar to you. With that in mind, the user experience we believe WPF may provide will give us the capabilities we want to utilize for many years. At any rate you have to start somewhere. ;-)
You have to learn your chosen GUI eventually.
As one of those outside consultants that comes in for these kinds of projects, I suggest a variation on option #2.
Engage one or two outside consultants.
Have them guide you through something like your option 2. You actually learn WPF and then (with their help) develop the architecture and implement it.
Your follow-on question ("suggestions on firms with expertise") is disturbing. If you don't have trusted technology partners, now is the time to start cultivating them. It will take a while to locate folks you can trust.
The only way to locate them is to pay them to do some work and see if you like them and the work. This process can take a long time.
Problems with doing #1 by yourself are the obvious ones. If you try to do this on a deadline without experts, you'll make mistakes. You'll cast those mistakes into concrete. You'll try to live with them forever. When learning something new, the calendar is the most dangerous thing imaginable.
Option #1 works when there's no time pressure.
You build something disposable while you're learning. Then build something which you know that you will have to throw away. Then build the real thing.
Problem with doing #3 is that you may be asking consultants to do too much. If they plan your architecture, you probably won't completely understand it. You'll cut corners and bad things can happen. If -- on the other hand -- you do it yourself, you'll understand why those corners shouldn't be cut.
Also, #3 is an opportunity for piling in every feature you think might be cool. Until you understand the technology, you don't really understand what's essential, what's easy and what's hard. You're very likely to demand something that's expensive and risky because it's difficult to understand exactly how expensive and risky it is.
First off, WPF is probably a good choice. This is being embraced by Microsoft, and really seems to be the direction things are going for long term development. I recently made a very similar decision to this, and decided to go with WPF. After the initial pain that comes with a new tech., it's proving a very good decision.
That being said, I'd highly recommend a mixture of 2 & 3.
If you can find a good consultant to help with the design, you should be able to bring them in to help you with the design and architecture phase, some initial construction of the project, and they can potentially also help your developers get up to speed. Having help in house (or at least on-call) will be tremendously helpful in getting the through initial phases of trying to develop with WPF.
It also helps to bring in a developer and/or designer who has experience working with WPF.
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I'm actually working for a little company of 10 people on the area of solar panels solutions in Chile. Am working on linux since 20 years now. When I studied programing I studied a lot with Eiffel which I found really a great language. Since, I'm frustrated from a language to another missing a lot of great concepts it offers like
real object (no string != String; ...)
multi-inheritance
polymorphism
genericity
contract.
Working now with Java because
its mostly free
the community for tutorials and helps is huge
its multi-platform
I'm looking for the pros & cons to convince the instances of my hierarchy (basically talking about justifying the price of the licences which are 1500$=>1y and 2000$=>2y) and to be a bit secured that I don't pretend I'll go with a solution I'll regret at term because it will be hard to get the support I need to get my solutions working. Is ISE Eiffel reliable for production use? Will I have to get hours of pain making work a solution?
What are the pros & cons?
Pros
Concepts helping me to write real good quality code (multi-inheritance, polymorphism, genericity, contract)
Pleasure to develop with such good tools
Quality and reliability of produced code
...
Cons
Poor community, meaning few tutorials
I'm not good in C so digging into the implementation of C libraries is something which will cost me (and to the company)
Price is high and has to be justified
My Curriculum will not be as well as if I have years of experience in Java
Formation of other programmers won't be easy if as most of them dont know these concepts
...
I also work in a small company and we have decided 2 years ago to make the move to Eiffel. We had the exact same questions as you are stating. We now have official licenses and support. I studied the Eiffel Web Framework a long time (from 2014) and knew that the only good way to be able to state that it can be used in production is to just do it.
So that is what we did and now the software is in production and working robust, safe and performs well. In production are web API's based on HAL+JSON and created with the EiffelWeb Framework and a self written framework extended with reusable domain components created for the companies goals.
So ISE Eiffel is certainly reliable for production use and the support is outstanding.
You won't have any hours of pain as you call it, but when you write software with EiffelStudio you get many hours of joy, but all the other aspects of software engineering will be as hard as ever ;-).
About your other cons, my two cents are:
For a curriculum, more important is who you are as a person and if you fit in the current team. In my opinion when someone is educated in a model driven approach and acts and thinks like that, can use that knowledge quickly on any environment. That for me personally is more important then being good at one specific programming language. Although I understand that in some cases we also need specialists to get a job done quickly. It all is a matter of personal choice, both are needed in the industry.
If you need other programmers that get in the team doing this, you can only work with people that want that. I know from experience, that some people want it and other people just won't. My advice is not to put energy into the people that do not want it. Work with the technology, show that it works and maybe they get convinced, else seek for others that do see this.
If the management is not behind the decision to work not only with Eiffel, but also with the ideas of Bertrand Meyer, then don't do it. You will find yourself always fighting against it, while it is very hard for others (not software related) to understand. It is a matter of trust, when there is no trust (at both sides) -> don't do it.
We now also get questions about how the Eiffel environment is handling vulnerabilities, which are compared to the way e.g. Linux and Java communities are handling that. Eiffel is not used as much as those technologies, but the Eiffel software itself is build on the strong quality core of the Eiffel method and language. This can simply not be compared with other environments. But again others do not understand this, so how is this going to be addressed? This is an example where you run into when you will be using the Eiffel technology.
A lot of words, but the plain answer to your question is just : YES it can!
It's certainly reliable enough for production use.
You may well have to write wrappers for C-libraries, depending upon exacly what you want to do.
You mention web services. There is a good web framework. But there is no support (that I know of) for W3C XML schemas, for instance.
I would suggest you try writing a small prototype using the GPL edition (you won't be distributing the prototype, so you will not be restricted by the GPL). Then you should be able to assess for yourself the suitability for your usage.
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We need to implement a one-form app (long form) that persists into Oracle DB. There are no Web services of any kind. The culture is traditionally Java-oriented here but it's open for suggestions.
What are the Pros and Cons of going with:
The traditional MVC Java stack - Spring, Struts2 or SpringMvC, Hibernate
The JS (modern) stack - AngularJS, NodeJS, ReactJS
Any clear explanation of the differences, with the Pros and Cons, would be strongly appreciated.
As I stated, I haven't been able to find a reasonable and understandable comparison.
It's apples and oranges. I'm only posting this as an answer because it outgrew the comment.
First to nitpick a bit, AngularJS is front-end technology, you can use it with any back-end technology (I use it with Struts2). So lets remove that from the comparison.
Second nitpick your comparison is more a JS vs Java choice. If you did your research you could be comparing NodeJS against Play, Vert.x, or similar. Not because those frameworks are "modern" but because they share some of design goals which made NodeJS what it is (Vert.x is very similar in intention, it has comparable speed, non-blocking design, and allows for polyglot programming).
But really there is something more fundamental than the frameworks... and that is the language. If you know JS and you've worked on the front end design did a mockup and then need to develop server side services and aren't more comfortable with another language, well it really doesn't make sense to invest in that heavy lifting when you can start doing something useful right away. It's also the same the other way (from the Java perspective) no matter what the framework you need to invest time, if you already know a Java web framework, why waste your time figuring out something else?
That last question isn't rhetorical, seriously why waste your time? In defence of keeping with JS, you can keep everything in one language, NodeJS is pretty fast, although keeping the comparison fair there are many Java web frameworks Struts2/SpringMVC don't have similar design goals to NodeJS while Play, Vert.x, and I'm sure there are others would be a more fair comparison. JS has a different way of doing things and if you have JS ninjas then it does make sense to do everything that way. As for why Java, it is fast, it has an enormous codebase, there are APIs and frameworks for everything, from meta programming, AI, robotics, security, obviously databases and everything common, there is enormous choice. It is more structured, in the end this means that months later you can generally figure out what you were doing and you can better share work and divisions of labour. But again, does any of that matter? I'm not looking to start an argument with the general public, only you know your requirements. Consider them and also consider human nature and take a reasonable course.
In my experience people use what they know, people I find are often splitting hairs over their favourite framework and someone else's for no other reason that that is what they know. If you're going to use some technical tooling advantage to try an get consensus that is highly unlikely to happen, and I would recommend first to look at your human resource capabilities; I mean you could write it in Java or JS, whatever but happy employees will produce way more regardless! What the majority would rather work with can't be discounted lightly.
This is not a question which stack you use. Pros and cons have nothing with the technology involved rather than humiliating the user experience by choosing one framework over another.
If you get any project from an idea to the production software you should know that many many, many factors apply on making decision on the architecture of the project. All it depends on the proposal that you should write first. The quality of this document will make influence on the further decisions and directions, feed-backs from the end user who is the consumer of the desired product.
No language, no framework, no programmer needed to provide you the user requirements. It's just the software that should do some things. That's all you need to know at the first time.
You can promise the user that you can build the software that is required, but you don't tell how it would be built, which language you use, framework, technology, resources.
You can see what other people is created and how it works and if it fits with what user is required then you luckily copy/paste. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in most cases and you have to pay for every brick in the building.
The most significant part over technology is programming resources. If you have such resources that you already tied a half which technology is preferred to use with the project. Technologies, languages, frameworks are different, and nobody can handle them all with expert level. You can build the software with one framework, then rebuild it from scratch with another and then you can compare. If you can't compare the costs used to build the software than your decision is just opinion based on other opinions.
The pro-vision occurred if you have experience of building production software on different platforms using different languages and different frameworks. Because many languages, frameworks are in most business problem oriented and recommended to use by experts as suitable to solve such kind of problems. There's no any point which one is better, because if you choose one that is more recommended than others and create ugly software using it you can't say that it's worse that others that are less recommended. On the other hand if you choose framework and create the great software that may be lacks some features available in other frameworks you'll win.
Don't play with the technology, use qualified consulting services. This is out of the topics of stackoverflow. Because this information is always commercial. Good luck with your endeavors to find the better software that suits your needs.
My company is doing a fair bit of WPF and Silverlight development recently and we are discovering that while we are darn good at slinging code, our UI design skills lack some "pizazz".
Where does one find a "devigner", as Microsoft calls them? Are there user groups (especially in the Dallas area) with these types of artists/usability experts?
I've had experience with web developers with these skill sets, but not so many with WPF/Silverlight experience and looking on the Internet for these people hasn't turned up much.
Edit: Made this a wiki so I can get a little more feedback without people thinking I'm fishing for points. So far the comments have been helpful.
In my experience, it's pretty tough to find these guys. Posting on job boards that are known to attract exceptional talent (such as 37signals and StackOverflow) is probably your best bet. You will probably end up finding someone who is a developer first and has a hobby-level passion for graphics design. These guys might not do the best work, but they will at least have both of the (mostly mutually exclusive) skills you are looking for.
A second option could be to hire a run-of-the-mill graphics designer and assign one of your developers to work with him and make all of the graphics stuff work in your application. This, of course, requires two people working on a project when you originally planned on having one but I think it's still a viable option.
EDIT: graphic design job postings/information
http://www.youthedesigner.com/graphic-design-jobs/
http://www.allgraphicdesign.com/jobs.html
http://www.coroflot.com/public/jobs_browse.asp
Even though it is getting easier to find these guys, it is still fairly hard as the skill sets are kind of mutually exclusive (as already noted) ... and because there is a training gap (most designers know only the Adobe suite of products (this is the part that is getting better).
I personally think you will find that you have to cultivate this blend of skills and that it may not be found in just one person.
One thing I would encourage you to watch is part 2 of the Hiking Mt. Avalon workshop. This part covers collaboration between the developer and the designer ... and also describes the developer/designer/integrator workflow ... which is a workflow that allows you to cultivate these types of people ... and to just deal with this difficult situation.
I personally think that it is easier to bring a developer closer to the designer world (in order to perform as your integrator/devigner ... because one of the main roles of this person is to understand the platform (i.e. WPF/Silverlight) and how to leverage it to make the designs into real live software ... without harming the design/artistic integrity.
In fact, I am an example of a developer with designer tendencies and often perform the role of integrator. I find myself spending a lot of time with our graphics artists/designers, trying to instill knowledge of the platform into them slowly but surely.
For example, showing them the slider isn't just a static graphic but a living, dynamic thing that can be restyled, retemplated, and have behavior. This is an example of trying to cultivate a designer so that he or she can perform more and more as an integrator/devigner ... and lessening the work the actual integrator has to do ... to the point where the role of the integrator may not even be needed anymore ... or looking at it another way ... having just cultivated a new integrator/devigner.
For the record, I can't stand the term 'devigner' either. I think integrator is a much better description of what the person finds themselves doing (i.e. crossing the chasm between development and design).
See these posts (1, 2, 3) for more info.
Hope that helps! You're not alone in your desire to find these types of people!
Why don't you ask on the MSDN WPF forum?
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/threads/
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Second Life is fun to play with, and some developers are creating content there, but I was wondering what useful resources (if any) are available in Second Life for professional software developers.
Discussion groups
Education/training
Vendor support
Development-related presentations or demos
Professional contacts
To clarify: I'm not really looking for information on developing stuff for use in Second Life (although those answers are welcome). I am looking for pointers to stuff in SL that programmers would find useful for their real-life work.
They have a site about some of these uses: http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/api/
and some pages on the language they kind of grew: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal
Like you I find playing around with SL pretty interesting for recreational coding. One of the experiences that made me think there was something to it was trying to code a working clock in a sandbox (a general building area in SL). Other avatars would walk past and make suggestions and as there's a fair few coders around it soon turned into an interesting collaborative effort. If only it was that simple in RL. Some things just work really neatly in SL - I once implemented a swarming algorithm using a flock of 'birds' as the objects (which gives a whole new take on oops).
As to resources - assuming you're beyond basic coding level then you should be able to figure most things out from the LSL Wiki - http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal.
There's an ebook - "Scripting Recipes for Second Life" by Jeff Heaton which covers the basics in a reasonably well laid out way. It's only a few dollars but probably only worth it if you've not done a great deal of coding elsewhere. There's also regular classes held in-world, but I believe most of these are at a pretty basic level.
For groups I've always found the Scripters of Second Life group very helpful with a lot of people generally on it. There's one called simply Scripts which is quite active too.
A couple of words of warning, LSL, whilst Turing-complete is pretty broken in several areas, lacks modern program constructs (and some older ones - like arrays!) and much of the 'black-art' of LSL is knowing how to work around the limitations, With the advent of Mono though this is likely to be a decreasing issue.
Also there does seem to be an assumption by the Lindens that if you want to do any 'heavy-lifting' code you'll do it on a server off-world and call and return results to/from SL. This isn't helped by the XMP-RPC implementation being very broken, although HTTP works fine (and generally better than might be expected).
I vaguely remember Dr Dobbs running some sort of ongoing "Programmer's Island" thingy in SL, but I can't find the reference right now.
Apparently some sort of "virtual conference" for software developers.
As far I'm concerned, I'm trying to contribute to the OpenSim project which is a OpenSource clone of the SecondLife server infrastructure, written in C# and Mono.
OpenSim is SL like, enhanced with many additional script commands, open grid protocols, with customized modules and plugins. It definitely worth a look if you dont already heard about it.
ControlBreak suggested this in a comment (I'm promoting it to an answer):
You can visit Microsoft Island. Presentations of new products are done regularly - http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=663#more-663
IBM, Microsoft and Sun are pretty active in Second Life and sometimes there are interesting presentations/demos to see. Some of those are great for networking and meeting people from those companies which work on products you're interested in.
There are several groups for Java, PHP and several other programming languages apart from LSL, however IMO they're not as good resource as other non-SL resources. You can get your questions answered more quickly on StackOverflow or IRC.
IBM held several interesting programming competitions - there was something with robots finding a way out of the maze by IBM, there are also robot wars and some other programming competitions in SL, however they are all LSL-oriented.
I think I saw a beginner PHP class once, so if you're interested in learning programming language from start, try searching events and you might find something; however those are pretty rare in my experience.
Look & Feel team Scripting, it's mine. Common 3D trouble is confusing camera center between camera or actor. A designer may think camera center is world when it should be actor.
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Basically I'm going to go a bit broad here and ask a few questions to get a bit of a picture of how people are handling UI these days.
Lately I've found it pretty easy to do some fancy things with UI design and with WPF specifically we're finding new ways to do layouts that are better looking and more functional for the user, but in contrast one of the business focused guys at our local .NET User Group wouldn't even think of using WPF until it had a datagrid that he could use to make Excel like input forms.
So basically, have you rethought the design of your business apps as you move to Web/WPF/Silverlight designs, because for us at least - in winforms we kept things fairly functional and uniform, or are you trying to keep that "known" UI?
Would a dedicated design guy (for larger teams), or a dev with more design chops rank higher when looking at hiring these days? (Check out what a designer did for Scott Hanselman's BabySmash and Microsoft's Prism demo)
Are there any design hints/tips/guidelines you use for your UI - especially for WPF?
What sites would you recommend for design?
I recommend that you read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think first. The book has a great checklist of things that you have to take into consideration when designing your UIs. While it's focused on web usability, a lot of the lessons therein are valuable even to desktop application designers.
That being said, whether you use Windows forms or WPF or Flash or whatever new and shiny thing that comes around is, it is of utmost importance to hire either a) a real designer, or b) a development guy with a lot of UI design experience, either of which who can provide you a serious URL for their design portfolio. It will help a lot not only in improving the design of your application but also unburdening your developers from thinking about UI design, and allow them to focus on the back-end code.
As for "business focused" guys -- it would be really great if you would get the opinion of actual customers and stake holders, and have them do some usability testing for your application. It's their opinion that would matter most.
I think it would not be difficult to get a good designer up to speed on Microsoft Expression Blend to whip up some good XAML designs that your team could use to come up with a really good product.
Here's a great screen cast where Billy Hollis goes into many of these issues:
http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=115
I think WPF can greatly improve user experience.
However there are not much business oriented controls out there which means you need to do a lot by yourself.
As for designers I think it's really hard to find WPF designer now days, it still would be a dedicated programmer rather then design-only guy.
I hope that this situation will change in nearest feature.
I think it's worth at least start experimenting with WPF to be able to compete with upcoming solutions.
The whole concept of re-thinking a UI of an existing application is dependent on the target audience. For a boring business application, like accounting or budgeting, it may even be counter-productive. For one, users of those kinds of apps may have used a similar looking and feeling UI for years and years, and second, looking too "cute" and colorful can even bring a perception of toy-ishness (is that a word?) with it.
We have done several new projects with the latest & greatest UI gadgets, and for the most part for new applications it seems to be a good chance to get some feedback from a live audience. Then it gets easier to translate that feedback into existing applications.
We also have some apps which are still actively developed (and used obviously), where the UI looks almost like in Windows 3.1. They're awful, gray, clunky, and our only real designer is always trying to get a permission to bring it to the current centrury - but the biggest customer actively refuses this. They say it's just fine, people know how to use it, and it works even in their oldest computers.
#aku "I think WPF can greatly improve user experience."
I believe that WPF has amazing potential as a tool to make UIs more creative and better suited to the actual data that is being displayed, BUT..............
Just the mere act of using WPF isn't going to make great UIs appear out of nowhere.
A great carpenter may use the best wood working tools, but that doesn't mean that if you picked up his tools you'd all of a sudden be popping out fine furniture.
Using WPF over HTML/Flash/WinForms/etc just increases your potential .
If that's potential for ugliness or potential for beauty is up to you.
#David H Aust That's part of the reason for asking the question - with these newer tools like WPF that lend themselves to providing newer, more intricate, and at the same time simpler for the user, interfaces that we might need to adapt to new ways of doing things.
And trying to find out who else is adapting/interested and what they are doing, and where they get some inspiration, knowledge or help :)
IE: This is me being proactive about change in possibly the slackest manner ever, short of actively googling :)
^ That was a joke, to make it clear, I'm actually pretty active about learning new stuff, I'm just finding some of the crowdsourcing stackoverflow vs googling pretty interesting :)
Microsoft is building a DataGrid for WPF. A CTP can be found here.
#Lars Truijens - Thanks, but I think for 99% of cases that's a horrible idea, and sure, there are uses - but I've found that with WPF there's typically a much better way to do it.
Plus you can use textboxes, and use an Enter as Tab override to move through them easily and swiftly.