Over the weekend there was quit a flurry of heated discussion about the
Composite UI Application Block (CAB) that was developed by the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft. It started with Ayende's "
Why I don't like Patterns & Practices efforts
" post, and continued with Sam
On CAB and P&P and
More on CAB and PAG
. Things continued with Ayende's
Sam Gentile is mad at me
, and
On the CAB Again, and
Be Silent they are Agile. Not wanting to leave all the fun to Sam and Ayende, Hammet (of Castle fame) responded with
The CAB way, and signs of community immaturity
, Chris Holmes jumped in with his
Ayende Bashes P&P and finally Adi offers a caution with his
Caution: This blog contains personal opinions
post.
From my perspective, there is a bit of complexity
with CAB. However,
as some others have pointed out in the comments to the posts mentioned
above, thats more due to the fact that CAB encompasses a couple
different components that utilize patterns that not everyone who is
starting out with CAB is comfortable with. When you get past the
initial hurdles, CAB can be broken down pretty simply. It provides
dependency injection so that the various components within your
application can be loosely coupled and injected at runtime (similar to
Windsor,
Spring, etc). It
provides an eventing infrastructure that allows for the events and
event handlers within your application to be loosely coupled (you might
be able to think of it as a
message bus for your UI), and it
provides a number of infrastructure services that allow for your
application to be broken up into a modules that can be used to create
an application that can be dynamically composed (think MasterPages with
a little bit of a plugin type architecture for building the UI at
runtime). For those starting
out it requires familiarity with dependency injection,
model view
presenter or model view controller, loosely coupled events/commands, as
well as an understanding of some of the requirements for a dynamically
composed UI. While it's not something I would use for every
application I develop, I think it's a good fit for certain
applications. For anything web related I'd steer clear of something
architected in a similar fashion and go with
MonoRail or if you can
swing it
Ruby on Rails. :)
Unfortunately, as I'm sure many in the chain of blog posts above would
attest, blog posts aren't always the most effective way to carry out a
discussion. It doesn't help when those involved are a group of deeply
passionate people who have strong feelings and opinions. I think the
primary points of each person's blog posts are important, relevant, and
worth a continued discussion. As Ayende points out, there are many
things within Microsoft, as well as within the deliverables provided by
P&P that seem to be more complex then they need to be. As Sam
states, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that that P&P group is
one of the few openly Agile groups within Microsoft. I really believe
they're trying to do the right things for customers, they're trying to
do as many things as possible to make sure they're not developing in a
vacuum, and that they're working on the things that their customers
really need. Are they perfect, absolutely not. Are they trying, I
think so. Are the deliverables they offer for everyone, no. Are their
deliverables appropriate for some, yes.
I think Hammet brings up another important point for us all to think
about regarding our community. We have a lot to learn, and a lot of
areas in which we can grow. Insulting one another, isn't the way to
go. Letting our emotions get the best of us is something we should try
and avoid. However, at the same time we don't want to lose our passion
and fire for what we believe in. Let us remember that we're all part
of the same community, and ultimately I think we're all after the same
things. When our emotions run high and we either say things that we
wish we hadn't said, or state things that aren't exactly true, we need
to take a step back and realize that sometimes our emotions do get the
best of us. But as far as I'm concerned, that's part of the process.
We're all human.
Over the last couple of days I've spoken with Sam a few times about
what's unfolded. For those of you who don't know, I have a unique
perspective on the situation since I work with Sam. He's a deeply
passionate individual who loves technology. He has an unquenchable
thirst for new information as our printers at work can attest to. He
genuinely wants to help the .NET community, and one of the ways that
he's done that is in pointing out some inaccuracies in Ayende's post on
CAB and P&P. Based on conversations Sam and I have had in the past, I think besides
some of the inaccuracies on how CAB was developed, Sam agrees with most (or maybe just some) of
what Ayende has said. As
Jeremy
pointed out, bringing up things that were said years ago isn't the way
to address any problems you might have with Sam on how he voiced his
concerns. Sam is a perfectionist, and will welcome any positive and
constructive feedback you can provide him. My constructive feedback is
to not let your emotions lead you to say things you'll regret the next
day. But I'd also suggest you keep your passion, and keep doing the
things that make you you. At the end of the day the most important
things for all of us is to be happy. Don't let what's happened in the
past get you down. We live and we learn. All we can hope for is that
we better ourselves over time. Let's leave the personal attacks to the
Java community (just kidding any of you Java peeps out there), and hope
we can make the .NET developer community a better place for those of us
who care about producing great software.