After a long time I decided to write my thoughts about enterprise content management systems (CMS) like Alfresco and the user interface that is distributed with it.
In an effort to simplify their IT architectures and optimize systems company-wide, many businesses are standardizing on a single content- management platform for document management, Web-content management, imaging and intranet publishing. To do so there are plenty of solutions and technologies on the market allowing users to save, update and find their content but many of them lack of a suitable user interface nor a fluid accessibility.
Traditional solutions offer a strong central content repository and an enterprise database without satisfying user's actual needs like effectiveness or simple usability. On the other hand, the user interface is rarely given such attention and I do think there is a huge gap between repositories and the way they interact with the user.
As I am in that business I might sound subjective and probably that I am, but for a couple of years my company (Jibe Source also used to be named iCodix) is targeting especially that market.
Showing posts with label ui. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ui. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Friday, January 11, 2008
REST and integration ... ?
Since REST has been adopted for a long time now it seems that applications integrations are the next step. Usually I thought that integrating different applications should be done via an ESB I am sure now that it is not true.
In my opinion any decent application should have different interfaces exposed to the world. One may consider WebServices and some others REST or any other technology or interface. To keep the focus on integration I will not discuss what is better even if I think that one should use the right tool for the right job.
Once an application has a REST interface it is very easy to access that information directly from the browser for example, even if you can use it on the server side too. The information provided might be in different format such as XML or JSON. JSON is very suitable for browsers and XML is better handled by the server side.
To get the data from the application and to make the user experience much better, people are using AJAX today, and that is for sure a must have. There are a lot of Javascript frameworks out there, opensource and commercials ones, that offers AJAX functionalities and also nice widgets or UI components. It is up to everyone to chose the framework that suites the best your needs.
At the end the integration is very easy to be done. It is true that security is a weak point in such an integration but that can be solved too.
To enable REST in your application it is good to consider the integration of a server side scripting language and of a templating framework. The templates should allow you to output different formats such as XML or JSON.
In my opinion any decent application should have different interfaces exposed to the world. One may consider WebServices and some others REST or any other technology or interface. To keep the focus on integration I will not discuss what is better even if I think that one should use the right tool for the right job.
Once an application has a REST interface it is very easy to access that information directly from the browser for example, even if you can use it on the server side too. The information provided might be in different format such as XML or JSON. JSON is very suitable for browsers and XML is better handled by the server side.
To get the data from the application and to make the user experience much better, people are using AJAX today, and that is for sure a must have. There are a lot of Javascript frameworks out there, opensource and commercials ones, that offers AJAX functionalities and also nice widgets or UI components. It is up to everyone to chose the framework that suites the best your needs.
At the end the integration is very easy to be done. It is true that security is a weak point in such an integration but that can be solved too.
To enable REST in your application it is good to consider the integration of a server side scripting language and of a templating framework. The templates should allow you to output different formats such as XML or JSON.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Rich Internet Application (RIA)
A non-expert talking about user interfaces should not be taken seriously, but here is some thoughts that came to my mind.
Well, a RIA is in fact a Web Application that has the features like a desktop application.
A classical web application (let's call it Web1.0 application) has something that we call web flows, presentations flows or whatever how else somebody use to call it. Those flows are page based flows and they dictate the way a user is browsing from one page to another and so on.
I would even say that the page flow is dictated by end user requirements for the usability of the application (i.e a real state application, bank application ... ).
A RIA (or Web2.0 apps) should not limit users to a predefined flow. I think there should be no flow at all, because the user should be able to do whatever he/she wants at any moment and in any way. For example, one should be able to lookup a contact information while writing an email.
Actually, MVC (model view controller) pattern helps in separating the user interface from the business logic. But, MVC has not much to do within this article so I will not discuss about it more.
In my mind a RIA should be totally decoupled from the server presentation flow, and there should be no presentation flow, as I said already.
What about loading the whole user interface at the startup time and let the user navigate through the application just the way he would do it in a desktop application? Well, there should be a possibility to enable some components to be loaded later for example the less used components. The communication with the server should be done using AJAX of course, but the presentation layer is entirely managed by the client side.
I agree that there are a lot of applications written following this principle already, but I guess there is some place to think about this and maybe add enhancements to this way of programming.
Well, a RIA is in fact a Web Application that has the features like a desktop application.
A classical web application (let's call it Web1.0 application) has something that we call web flows, presentations flows or whatever how else somebody use to call it. Those flows are page based flows and they dictate the way a user is browsing from one page to another and so on.
I would even say that the page flow is dictated by end user requirements for the usability of the application (i.e a real state application, bank application ... ).
A RIA (or Web2.0 apps) should not limit users to a predefined flow. I think there should be no flow at all, because the user should be able to do whatever he/she wants at any moment and in any way. For example, one should be able to lookup a contact information while writing an email.
Actually, MVC (model view controller) pattern helps in separating the user interface from the business logic. But, MVC has not much to do within this article so I will not discuss about it more.
In my mind a RIA should be totally decoupled from the server presentation flow, and there should be no presentation flow, as I said already.
What about loading the whole user interface at the startup time and let the user navigate through the application just the way he would do it in a desktop application? Well, there should be a possibility to enable some components to be loaded later for example the less used components. The communication with the server should be done using AJAX of course, but the presentation layer is entirely managed by the client side.
I agree that there are a lot of applications written following this principle already, but I guess there is some place to think about this and maybe add enhancements to this way of programming.
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