ONLY GOOD DESIGN WILL SAVE OUR WORLD

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 11:27 AM

Last night at the NYMMUG meeting, we had an excellent presentation by Jonathan Kaye, who made it all the way from Philadelphia to share with us the core concepts found in his book "Flash MX for Interactive Simulation".

Reading the book's title might lead you to think it is all about creating interfaces for machine simulations, which is covered, but as important as creating a compelling and realistic simulation is, the process of designing the structure of the systems working underneath is, from my point of view, the most valuable contribution of Jonathan's book, which was co-authored with David Castillo.

Jonathan focused in the process of translating a machine's feature set and functionality into an scalable UCM engine. UCM stands for User Interface Control Model, the OOP architecture for the Event-State-Action paradigm. We didn't get to see much of this done in ActionScript due to time constrains, but as I said above, the focus of the presentation was to show that good design is not rocket science, just a thoughtful job.

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OWEN VAN DIJK

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 11:39 AM

agreed, but good architecture builds also on a solid mixture between knowledge and, quite important, experience.

JOSH SANTANGELO

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 01:49 PM

Is there a reference or explanation somewhere on UCM and event-state-action? I'm not finding much.

KRISTIN

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 04:06 PM

But Oscar, Rocket science is just a thoughtful job :-)

JONATHAN KAYE

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 04:15 PM

Thanks for the compliments, Oscar!

I mentioned to Oscar that I learned about UCM through Ian Horrocks' book, Constructing the User Interface with Statecharts. I've been hard-pressed to find other references.

However, UCM is like MVC, MVP, etc. The event and state stuff is under the banner of statecharts, and you can look on my website (www.FlashSim.com) under Resources for links to a lot stuff on that topic. I think David Harel's original paper is a good starting point, and there's lots more in the UML domain.

OSCAR TRELLES

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 05:30 PM

You're most welcome Jonathan.

I just stressed on UCM exactly because is not very documented. I think we all have been exposed to MVC and/or MVP at some level. As Jonathan states, it is perfectly possible to apply statecharts in any architectural model. It's really up to the developer.

Josh, I'm sorry we can not offer you any resources on UCM, although I believe Jonathan covers it in his book. I promise I will post anything I might find on the subject.

JONATHAN KAYE

OCTOBER 24 2003 @ 05:58 PM

Here are some links I've found through Google:

- MVC vs. UCM http://www.sm.luth.se/csee/courses/smd/100/slides/mvc.pdf
- Ian Horrocks book http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201342782/102-6372581-5592942?v=glance
- UCM with statecharts http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~xiaodong/teaching/VCSI/ch3.pdf
- My white paper about UCM with statecharts http://www.flashsim.com/pubDown/hbps/

BO WRIGHT

OCTOBER 25 2003 @ 03:33 AM

Sounds like the meeting was a good time. I wish that I didn't have a class Thursday evening, and then I could go to more of the meetings. I am wondering how long do those sessions run usually?

POZYCJONOWANIE

FEBRUARY 7 2007 @ 09:26 AM

was a good time. I wish that I didn't have a class Thursday evening, and then I could go to more of the meetings. I am wondering how long do those sessions run usually?