Chapter 7 -- Prototyping a DHTML User Interface

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Chapter 7

Starting with the requirement model or specification and the facade class test stub you've provided, the GUI developers can now create the first prototype of the user interface.

If the part of the application under discussion (maintaining information about horses) were being designed for Internet uses, a GUI developer would probably employ Microsoft Visual InterDev to create an Active Server Page. Alternatively, the developer could use the new webclasses in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to create an Internet Information Service (IIS) application. In either case, the user would always see standard HTML pages.

For the application at hand, however, the user is better off with a Microsoft Windows user interface, such as a Visual Basic form or a dynamic HTML (DHTML) page; the effectiveness of the application and the experience of the user will be so much better than standard HTML pages can offer, since these are static by nature. (Only internal users will have access to this part of the application anyway, so your chances of stipulating one of these types of GUI should be good.) So our GUI developers might decide to use either Visual InterDev 6.0 or the new DHTML Page Designer included in Visual Basic 6.0 to create this part of the application.

As you probably realize by now, we favor Visual Basic for many tasks, so initially we leaned toward using the DHTML Page Designer. For a couple of reasons, however, we decided to use Visual InterDev instead.

The main reason we didn't use Visual Basic was that we found the Visual Basic DHTML Page Designer just a little bit too restrictive. It depends on the Visual Basic Virtual Machine, which we didn't want to force on every client. Admittedly, we opted for DHTML and Remote Data Service (RDS), so our solution still depends on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later, but since we use JavaScript and VBScript rather than compiled Visual Basic code, the solution is really a little less demanding on the client's environment.