Designing for flexibility: separating user interface design from program logic and data

  • Authors:

  • Marko Niinimäki;Miika Tuisku;Matti Heikkurinen

  • Affiliations:

  • Helsinki Institute of Physics at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland;Helsinki Institute of Physics at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland;Helsinki Institute of Physics at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ISICT '03 Proceedings of the 1st international symposium on Information and communication technologies
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

In modern software development it is increasingly important to bear in mind that the software should match with changing user requirements. The "design for change" perspective may not have been completely understood in the design for World Wide Web based applications. In this paper, we present methods to modularize storage access, domain objects, program logic and user interface into manageable modules. In our opinion, this will lead to better understanding of the software, help the users and programmers to communicate and help the programmers to manage their tasks. We shall, too, propose methods to express some of these modules in a declarative (XML) language, instead of a programming language.As a case study, we consider MDV, a document management program and demonstrate the practical benefits gained by using the modularization.