Anne Maynes of the Gartner Group said in the SOA conference earlier this month that software architecture must change to embrace the plethora of platforms and form factors that are emerging.
This is a subject very close to my own interests and after working for many years in a major European bank where I sang the same song for about six years and only found deaf ears I feel at once pleased that the idea is becoming mainstream enough for Gartner to be shouting about it and depressed that I was not able to convince people that such a thing was needed.
Interestingly, I am making great effort at the moment to create some mobile phone applications which present their own special challenges. I am not the worlds expert on the different API sets afforded by Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android but I feel very confident creating applications in C#. A technique that I have been developing over the last couple of years relies on a modified form of MVVM in which the application interacts with a strongly defined and bidirectional presentation layer. This application component is then capable of being bound in an abstract way to the various data-binding or equivalent mechanisms present in the diverse UI systems provided by the different platforms.
I have proven to myself at least that creating an application that has no UI whatsoever is a viable model and that the UI systems can be added on afterwards such that the application can be made compatible with any platform. I have tested this system and it works fine for WinForms, WPF, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 7 as well as ASP.Net and Mac. Interestingly I develop in Visual Studio 2010 to validate the application and then transfer the code to Mono for the platforms which do not natively support C#.
No comments:
Post a Comment