Presentation: "Objects vs. The Web"
Tuesday 13:00 - 13:45, Public Room
Applying software engineering principles, particularly object-oriented techniques, to the Web is not always easy. Many current Web technologies lend themselves to, or even encourage, bad practices. Scripting and server-page technologies can encourage cut-and-paste reuse, direct-to-database coding, and poor factoring. Component models like COM and EJB seek to construct building blocks for application assembly, but in doing so they sacrifice many of the advantages of objects. XML emphasizes technology-independent reuse and sharing of content, data, and messaging but at the expense of encapsulation and OO's fundamental association of behaviour and state.
This talk examines some representative Web technologies and the issues they present. We describe several variations of a layered, OO architecture, based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. The variety of applications makes it impossible to define a single recipe for "the right way" to build web applications. Instead, we emphasize the possible variations, the issues they address, and the possible drawbacks, within the overall theme of building scalable, maintainable, well-structured applications. The discussion is supported by code examples in both Smalltalk and Java, and with examples of good and bad decisions from the speaker's experiences.
Objects vs. The Web - (slides)
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