Sonntag MVC without strings or name

[RobertShiplett]

If you run my alternate version of the demo, you will see "clear" and "content" in the main applet and each sub-pane This is my best obvious case for not using strings as identifiers to search on and code against in MVC. At least in Smalltalk after 1980 we were using Smalltalk symbols. I will post on the recent Smalltalk Announcements framework over at lcurlr.blogspot.com and lcurlr.tiddlyspace.com

A strong case for re-thinking MVC was also made by Dolphin Smalltalk at object-arts.com

MVC was a strength of Smalltlalk ( still in use at JP Morgan and other major corp's - more widely used than Curl and for a decade longer) - but it is also what made for a steep learnng curve.

We might also remember that Struts 1.0 got MVC wrong - as did the first pass at Java so I hope we are open to learning from other engineering experience over the years.

It was our experience over decades in Smalltalk that >> perform #symbol ( the equivalent of Curl's {do-command cmd-string} had to be held in check.

We have macros and traits, so we could enforce a pattern {mvc-command a-command-object}

I hope we can look back at Sonntag as "Smart-tag" and get this tagging pattern right on a 2nd or 3rd iteration and incorporate it into the defaults for the AdvancedUI.

And we must beware of the simple demo - something that we also learned in Smalltalk. The only test of a framewrk is a real app that is "handed-off" by the expert and that then goes on to survive the code change-request and maintenance cycle.

When the authors of Annuncements were asked why their framework was different, they said because now we were using objects. That should be sobering for the original OOP + MVC language. MVC is not easy to get right the first time.