NO and/vs the MVC pattern, and other criticisms on the DDD list (was: Re: problem running quickstart being prompted for username/password)

[Dan Haywood <da...@haywood-associates.co.uk>]

On 14 August 2012 12:15, Mark Wood-Patrick <mw...@gmail.com> wrote:

> In
>
>                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_objects
>
> It says:
>
> Naked Objects is commonly contrasted with the model-view-controller
> pattern.
> However, the published version of Pawson's thesis (see References) contains
> a foreword by Trygve Reenskaug, who first formulated the
> model-view-controller pattern, suggesting that naked objects is closer to
> the original intent of model-view-controller than many of the subsequent
> interpretations and implementations.
>
>
> I'd like to understand why folks question whether Naked Objects paradigm
> follows MVC and where they believe it does not follow MVC, anyone know of
> any such references?
>
>
That text in wikipedia was written by Richard Pawson, who was attempting to
point out to various nay-sayers of the naked objects pattern that NO is
very much in accord with MVC.  I can't give you any specific references
though - that text was in the very first version of that page (Aug 2007).

An early criticiser of NO was Larry Constantine, who wrote an article "The
Emperor has No Clothes" [1].  He is a usability / UI specialist, so
obviously the idea of an auto-generated UI was anathema.

There hasn't been much other coherent argument against NO though, that I
can recall.  But in years gone by we must have handled things very badly,
because these days if I see anything about NO at all it tends to be
negative.  A couple of recent tweets in response to the RO article we put
up on infoq [2]: "the naked argument was beaten to death on the DDD list a
few years back.  annoying that it's back again" and "Naked Objects eh? One
of the silliest ideas i've read in a while.  Who needs UX?" and "... a big
fat helping of Naked Objects insanity".  This is the usual level of debate
these days (which is to say... it's just not worth having the debate).

With respect to the DDD list, it ultimately got too depressing to be on
there; any approach not some derivative of CQRS or used a framework was
apparently wrong. ORMs and dependency injection into entities and even ACID
(you know, the highly controversial use of begin tran ... commit) are just
not how things are done over there.  A common stance is to trivialise NO as
only being appropriate for CRUD systems.  Here's a fairly typical thread
[3].  There was another quite spectacular thread more recently on the same
forum... search for "InfoQ article on Restful Objects" and brace yourself
to be offended.

And it would seem that even our major existence proof of the validity of
the naked objects pattern (namely, the Irish government system) does not
seem to cut the mustard.  I remember highlighting this on the DDD list and
saying that the CIO for the government was on record as saying "'in 30
years of managing IT projects, I have never been more satisfied".  He also
commented here [4] and was quoted more completely here [5].  The DDD list
trashed this quote, as well, though [6].

To counterbalance all this doom-and-gloom, Ed Yourdon yesterday tweeted:
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are (Anais Nin)".  This
cheered me up enormously.

HTH
Dan

[1] http://foruse.com/articles/nakedobjects.pdf
[2] http://www.infoq.com/articles/Intro_Restful_Objects
[3] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/message/9525
[4] http://www.infoq.com/articles/RAD-Naked-Objects#view_37542
[5] http://nakedobjects.net/news/news_intro.shtml
[6] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/message/9563




>
>
> Mark
>
>

Re: NO and/vs the MVC pattern, and other criticisms on the DDD list (was: Re: problem running quickstart being prompted for username/password)

[Rafael Chaves <ra...@alphasimple.com>]

I am hoping we can all agree that there will be cases a generic UI will be
suitable and possibly the best choice, and cases a handwritten UI will work
much better (or even be the only suitable option). That is what I like in
RO over the vanilla NO approach: it provides most of the benefits of a
domain first approach, yet it works great with a handwritten UI as well.

Cheers,

Rafael

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 12:07 PM, Dan Haywood
<da...@haywood-associates.co.uk>wrote:

> On 14 August 2012 12:15, Mark Wood-Patrick <mw...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In
> >
> >                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_objects
> >
> > It says:
> >
> > Naked Objects is commonly contrasted with the model-view-controller
> > pattern.
> > However, the published version of Pawson's thesis (see References)
> contains
> > a foreword by Trygve Reenskaug, who first formulated the
> > model-view-controller pattern, suggesting that naked objects is closer to
> > the original intent of model-view-controller than many of the subsequent
> > interpretations and implementations.
> >
> >
> > I'd like to understand why folks question whether Naked Objects paradigm
> > follows MVC and where they believe it does not follow MVC, anyone know of
> > any such references?
> >
> >
> That text in wikipedia was written by Richard Pawson, who was attempting to
> point out to various nay-sayers of the naked objects pattern that NO is
> very much in accord with MVC.  I can't give you any specific references
> though - that text was in the very first version of that page (Aug 2007).
>
> An early criticiser of NO was Larry Constantine, who wrote an article "The
> Emperor has No Clothes" [1].  He is a usability / UI specialist, so
> obviously the idea of an auto-generated UI was anathema.
>
> There hasn't been much other coherent argument against NO though, that I
> can recall.  But in years gone by we must have handled things very badly,
> because these days if I see anything about NO at all it tends to be
> negative.  A couple of recent tweets in response to the RO article we put
> up on infoq [2]: "the naked argument was beaten to death on the DDD list a
> few years back.  annoying that it's back again" and "Naked Objects eh? One
> of the silliest ideas i've read in a while.  Who needs UX?" and "... a big
> fat helping of Naked Objects insanity".  This is the usual level of debate
> these days (which is to say... it's just not worth having the debate).
>
> With respect to the DDD list, it ultimately got too depressing to be on
> there; any approach not some derivative of CQRS or used a framework was
> apparently wrong. ORMs and dependency injection into entities and even ACID
> (you know, the highly controversial use of begin tran ... commit) are just
> not how things are done over there.  A common stance is to trivialise NO as
> only being appropriate for CRUD systems.  Here's a fairly typical thread
> [3].  There was another quite spectacular thread more recently on the same
> forum... search for "InfoQ article on Restful Objects" and brace yourself
> to be offended.
>
> And it would seem that even our major existence proof of the validity of
> the naked objects pattern (namely, the Irish government system) does not
> seem to cut the mustard.  I remember highlighting this on the DDD list and
> saying that the CIO for the government was on record as saying "'in 30
> years of managing IT projects, I have never been more satisfied".  He also
> commented here [4] and was quoted more completely here [5].  The DDD list
> trashed this quote, as well, though [6].
>
> To counterbalance all this doom-and-gloom, Ed Yourdon yesterday tweeted:
> "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are (Anais Nin)".  This
> cheered me up enormously.
>
> HTH
> Dan
>
> [1] http://foruse.com/articles/nakedobjects.pdf
> [2] http://www.infoq.com/articles/Intro_Restful_Objects
> [3] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/message/9525
> [4] http://www.infoq.com/articles/RAD-Naked-Objects#view_37542
> [5] http://nakedobjects.net/news/news_intro.shtml
> [6] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/domaindrivendesign/message/9563
>
>
>
>
> >
> >
> > Mark
> >
> >
>