JavaZone 2011 - Goal-directed web applications with Scala
Prototypical applications found in industry today are heavily orientated toward solving the relevant problem, with a UI that is designed for simply satisfying input to the domain objects; resulting in UIs that often leave the user with little specific information on what the primary intent of the display is.
Goal-directed design however can greatly assist in these scenarios by placing the user experience in a central place during the inception of any given system. Goal-directed design is orientated toward capturing user intention and sending messages (or commands) back to the server, rather than mutated transformation objects (DTOs) that are simply persisted by the system, with little appreciation for what specifically changed or what the user was achieving.
This notion of sending messages has a strong synergy with actor based messaging. This session shows you how to model goal direction and task definition as small, manageable chunks of application functionality which are both far easier to reason about and far more convenient to scale compared to the mass of plumbing found in many enterprise applications.
Timothy Perrett
Timothy Perrett is a UK based developer, technologist and author of Lift in Action, the book about Scala Lift. Having worked in and around manufacturing and workflow systems for over seven years, he has wealth of experience building machine automation and writing system integration middleware. Timothy is an active committer on the Lift project and has been for the past three years.