4.1. SERVER SIDE
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standard for the exchange of structured information in a decentralised and distributed fashion. By incorporating Apache Axis9 , this system service provides Argos with the ability to create and deploy web service applications. Using such a standardised approach, Argos is able to exchange information with any application, neither limited by the programming language it is written in nor the platform it is running on. We believe Argos is well suited for our prototype development because we can benefit from its set of system services. By directly utilising these system service we can focus on the business logic in the application, instead of having to worry about implementing support for web services, database handling and more.
4.1.2
Graphical User Interface
The prototype development involved in this thesis must provide a rich and powerful GUI. Having a poorly designed GUI can cause people to abstain from using it. That said, everyone with experiences in GUI development knows how much time is required, and that the actual code often becomes very repetitive and difficult to maintain. Many solutions exist where the developer is offered help when designing user interfaces. Examples of such help include visual designing of the user interface and code generation. In this section we will give examples on how user interfaces can be developed using some existing techniques. Simple editor This technique requires only a simple editor and the Software Development Kit (SDK) for the programming language to be used installed on the computer. Here the programmer has no help apart from the already defined GUI components in the programming language. This approach is time consuming and requires high knowledge of how programming languages design user interfaces. There is no doubt that the programmer has full control using this approach. A clear separation between the application logic and user interface can be made by the programmer since no code generation is done. Another advantage is that no special editor is required to be able to read and understand the source files for the project. NetBeans and Eclipse The previous technique is not bound to any programming language, in this paragraph and the next we will present available technologies for Java and Microsoft .NET framework respectively. NetBeans10 and Eclipse11 both provide a very powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for building Java applications. They have form designers where the programmer can create user interfaces by dragging and dropping components to visually construct Java applications. NetBeans’ designer is preferred over the one available for Eclipse. Developing the interfaces requires less time, NetBeans has more advanced features and is more intuitive to use. The code behind the designed user interface is generated by the IDE software and is tagged as “do not touch�-parts in the particular classes. A negative aspect of this approach is that the programmer will have a mix of generated code and programmer specific code. However, the programmer will probably save a lot of time with help from a visual designer. 9
http://ws.apache.org/axis/ http://www.netbeans.org/ 11 http://www.eclipse.org/ 10