40. (with egg)

I went to the SF Ruby Meetup for the first time on June 12; great turnout by all accounts, about 80 people or so. The first presenter, Derek Haynes (Highgroove Studios) talked about building the perfect Rails team, and we've done so at my company if you follow his formula. But more interesting to me is this trend, which other might have known for a long time: design-first development.

Here's what I've gleaned from the few talks I've heard about this: in design-first development, server side modeling is almost completely ignored in favor of really nailing the UI design, flow, features, and user experience. Developers/Designers (devigners?) go strait for the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, mocking out any AJAX calls to make the design seem like it's really talking to the server. This is iterative, but not in the sense that the entire end-to-end system is designed and refactored along the way. Only after the design is whiz-bang'ed and solid do the developers bolt on (my words) a model layer. I've heard this pushed the Haynes talk, and also by web design guru Dan Cederholm (Bullet Proof Web Design and SimpleBits), and by some members of my own development team.

This is completely foreign to me. I'm model guy, an end-to-end guy. I work from the domain model layer out towards the UI, and get a very simple thing working first, then refactor towards the ultimate design. And even then my UI is going too look like cat puke until I feel like I can devote the time to really getting it right, but usually after the model is solid. So my first reaction it to recoiled from design-first development and start saying works like "scaling!" and "domain-driven development!" and "do the simplest thing possible!" and "YAGNI!" and "models should be understood by our customers!". But is this justified? On most of the Rails projects we're developing for our clients, we knock out the server side stuff, including DB, models, and controllers very quickly (and yes, test the hell out of them), then spend the majority of time in Jails (JavaScript for Rails). And when we have had nice mockups from clients we have stuck to them, for the most part. I'll have to talk to some DFD'ers and see how the bolted-on models hold up.

1 Comments (from old blog:

At 6/16/2006 9:55 AM, DrydenMaker said…

I tend to agree with your thoughts. The difference that is evolving is that the UI is putting on weight and there is more programming going on there that makes the server side easier. We are moving toward the 'programmable web'.

DrydenMaker http://webdevsnob.blogspot.com/