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(Friday web update done before anything was written here)
* Today's seminar ended up being less than planned for
several reasons. Mostly there was the problem of some out-of-town participants
coming much later and having to leave much earlier due to travel problems
(train instead of bus). Other participants were called to meetings with
employment agency officials, or in one case to an employment interview. In
addition, code implementation of design ideas was derailed by strange
complications with the J++ v6 installation, where code was not compiling,
but instead gagging on the first constructor calls.
I filled in with more general background, some history of Java, and a few
top-level webpage design issues. Looking at some typical design efforts directed
at providing well-structured link-paths to wander from the top page down
into the many subordinate pages. I was prompted to remind the groups that
the Web is a timeless, asynchronous place. I used these contrasting views:
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What webdesigners often and mistakenly do, is like planning a specific entrance
and guided tour, as if leading people around in a building (e.g. museum).
A lot of effort is spent designing this controlled visitor flow, usually
assuming that the visitor can always "back out" of the deeper levels to reach
the parent page with further links to sibling pages.
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The reality of Web visits is more the "StarTrek" model, with people at random
intervals beaming directly in and out of arbitrary pages on the site. As
it happens, there are a few ways to enforce controlled views, but
these are usually a Bad Idea. Hence, each page must be able to stand on its
own, by giving some indication of the context in which it exists, and by
providing at least a minimum of backlinks up to higher levels in the site
structure.
I also gave the groups a taste of a more practical design environment in
the form of developing a simple use case specification of a "shopping cart"
model, something that may well be asked for on a website. During the design,
I reminded them of the way people "drop in" and "drop out" of websites in
general and asked how they would track which user has which virtual shopping
cart. I think they really began to get the picture about then.
To this ongoing design work, I would then at random moments inject the typical
"refinements" in a project description that may come from the sponsor, e.g.:
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the wish that different product fields than originally specified be presented
for selection
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the non-intuitive feature information that in this imagined case the inventory
database field "in-stock" did not in fact ever have value 0 (then instead
being filled with expected delivery date) -- for Java coders, this also means
type declaration changes, but we were not supposed to be at the code
implementation level yet, so I never brought up that issue here.
There were of course the predictable moments of design <rip>,
<crumple>, and <toss>, as one or another aspect of the object
model crashed into the changed requirements, but that's all part of the fun
of such an exercise.
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See the
update-link (above) that points where I last added
some text, which should simplify your keeping up to speed. Of course, you
may still have to scroll back a bit and see if I've updated more than once
since you last visited, but that is easily done.
.