Customizable CRUD

[eluser]kucerar[/eluser]
This is interesting. Looks very flexible. Take a look at ATK's idea of "attributes" for more ideas

http://www.ibuildings.nl/wiki/ATK_Attributes

ATK is a fairly large monolithic framework.

The trouble with CRUD is that when you get focused on widgets you end up developing stovepipes (your data and functionality is sunk in there, and you're dependent on the CRUD for whatever limited displays it has).

What I'd like to see is a CRUD that defined SOA endpoints instead of generated web pages.

That way you could lightweight clients like built with EXTjs, or a sharepoint web part, or something, that could then communicate with your CRUD by exchanging small documents.

Error messages etc could be passed as part of the document, in the case of loosely coupled data entry forms with the CRUD server.

The basic design of ATK is "module" containing of one or more "nodes" (point to table basically) containing one or more "attributes" (field level mappings). It's very flexible and very good at mapping to legacy (though this is not always necessary, there is another enterprise pattern that doesn't integrate directly into legacy systems, but gathers stuff, then forwards messages into the system, a CRUD mapper is not the correct choice for this, I can say after having made the incorrect choice :-)

I think ATK's design is sound. But I want to remove the HTML half and just have it deal with XML/JSON exchange. It does no good to replace an Oracle Forms stovepipe with a PHP Forms stovepipe. It costs the same and it's all in one place. The cost of these things needs to be distributed. Strategic.

There, have said too much,

-Rich