UI-based design and development for client/server applications [Book Reviews]

In this text the authors state that they use the top 4GL integrated development environment products “to illustrate the development of a large-scale client/server application example.” Beginning very enthusiastically, the authors talk about the book as if it is the outcome of a very successful project. The authors intend the audience to be mainframe professionals who need help translating their skills for client-server, object-oriented, and graphical user interface applications (I abbreviate these terms as CS/OO/GUI). The book starts by using abbreviations that only computer professionals with a mainframe background would recognize. As the book moves on, CS/OO/GUI jargon becomes commonplace. The authors should have included a glossary. As it is, the reader must continually review previous pages to find the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations. This is annoying and it becomes clear that the reader needs quite a lot of knowledge of CS/OO/GUI to understand what the authors are saying. The authors make the assumption that, for the foreseeable future, CS/oO/GUI is the way to go in data processing and that the important new skills involve the “new wave” of CS/OO/GUI 4GL workbenches, such as PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, SQLWindows, and PARTS Workbench. The book includes discussions on the pros and cons of corporate mainframes, centralized data processing, multiple parallel processor machines, midrange minicomputers, workstations, and personal computers (“The key to CS”). The text then goes on to explain the different operating systems related to each type of hardware platform and their possibilities for the future. The authors consider relational databases to be the “cornerstone” of CS computing. They suggest that an insight into computer communication is critical in understanding CS. There then follows a general overview of computer communications and the background to CS systems. After an overview of CS/OO/GUI (this can be skipped by the more enlightened reader), the authors build a sample business application with each of the four products. The example application that the authors use is small enough to be built in a short amount of time by one person. The book emphasizes the importance of good GUI design, recommends adhering to GUI standards, encourages the use of meaningful variable names, and stresses the importance of building on-line help into a system. The authors discuss the hardware and software requirements in considerable detail; this is useful for those thinking about buying one of the products mentioned in the book. When describing SQLWindows, the authors briefly mention project management, but only in relation to the facilities available for this in the product. The authors encourage interactive development, but unfortunately they approach development by prototyping and hacking the application together. The authors spend almost no time discussing the development of larger systems that require a project team. On first seeing the book, I thought it would contain a good design strategy for the CS/OO/GUI environment-an important consideration. Occasionally the authors talk about shared libraries with reusable functions and objects. Again this is not described as part of any real design strategy. And nowtesting. Unfortunately, the book falls down again. There is no mention of test strategy and test data. In fact the book confuses testing with debugging and goes on to describe all the facilities available in the product that allow the user/programmer to debug the application. The authors try to use big name 4GL integrated development environment products “to illustrate the development of a large scale CS application example.” In fact they have described in painstaking detail-including every mouse click and double click-the construction of a very small example system. The laborious details of this process take up 70% of the book. A more generic approach using the 4GL workbenches to illustrate small parts of the prototyping and implementation stages would be much more desirable. The book is, in many respects, self-contained and could be useful as an introductory reference text for anyone using one of the four products that the authors discuss. It would be nice to see a summary towards the end of the book-but unfortunately this isn’t the case. Considering the path the authors took in writing this book, I expected an in-depth comparison and review of the four products used; instead, most pages simply describe what buttons to press, when, and why. It appears that the book has been cobbled together fairly rapidly. The one thing I expected to gain from this book wasn’t there-a good structured approach to GUI-based design and development for CS applications.