Following on from my last post about customer chats on the booth; today I was chatting to a guy who had an interesting question, “What Are Products Such as Lightswitch Good For?” Now that question is an important question because we have XAF a product which, although more advanced in its feature set, operates in the same space as Lightswitch. So let’s see if we can answer that question…
Time is Money
XAF helps you bring your solution to your customers faster because it scaffolds the UI and database aspects of the application for you. The “plumbing'” boilerplate code for object persistence, via database, can take a long time to write, and it doesn’t really have any baring on the problem you are trying to solve. The same applies of simple CRUD UI forms or views. Having this done for you, by the framework, is a boon in terms of time saved.
Clearing the Swamp or Fighting Alligators
There is an old saying which goes something like, “When you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp”. The same thing applies in software engineering. The more code you have to write, like database “plumbing” code, the further away you get from the core of the problem you have to solve. How many times have you been working on trying to solve problem X for your company, only to become mired in ADO.Net – or similar – code, which really has nothing to do with solving the problem at hand? XAF’s scaffolding of this code for you, frees you to concentrate on your company’s problem, that is after all, where your subject matter expertise lies.
Consistent UI Across the Enterprise
If you are like me then you are a software engineer and just do not have the eye for the finer points of UI design. Well I say finer points, I really mean any points whatsoever. My UI design always look like they have been painted by a small child on a bad day. Now the default UI generated by XAF may not be “your cup of tea”, but if it’s better than you could do yourself then it will give you a professional and consistent look and feel across your enterprise.
Consistent Data Access Model
In my last post I touched on the fact that I’ve worked in enterprises where every architect has their own ideas about what a DAL should look like and so you see a slightly different approach in every project that you encounter. XAF, by virtue of it’s data access scaffolding, will give you a consistent approach throughout all of your applications.
Write Once Run Everywhere
It has long been a utopian dream that an engineer could write code once and have it run on every necessary platform. Well we are a long way from that dream aren’t we? I mean the code required to have your application run on a winforms platform is different from the code required to run it on a webforms platform, right? We’ll I’m not saying we are fully there yet with every platform, but XAF will allow you to define your application once and it will take care of the code required to have your application run on both winforms and webforms platforms – you don’t have to do anything extra.
After explaining these things to the guy, and giving him a demo of XAF, he went away impressed and with a better understanding of the benefits that frameworks can bring to a developer. I hope you have too.