accessibility, not grids

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Thu Jul 7 04:27:10 UTC 2005


On Wed, 06 Jul 2005 20:09:13 -0700, Chris Muller <chris at funkyobjects.org>  
wrote:

> It's so popular and yet, straight-out "grids" occur rarely in class-based
> business domain models.  Seriously, name three logical business entities  
> you  want to model as a grid in your actual domain?

All of 'em. No, seriously, while I'd like to model, for example,  
"contacts" as a series of related classes with specialized attributes for  
employees, customers, vendors, etc., sometimes I just want to see names  
and phone numbers in a grid.

I used to do a lot of demographics work, where the data really is grid.  
That's sort of the point, really. You don't deal with individuals, just  
groups.

> Maybe there some
> high-volume-data applications such as astronomical data, but how about  
> in more conventional business?  In most cases, whatever relationship  
> that ends up
> complex enough to represent as a grid ultimately (should) end up  
> represented in as more-meaningful graph of objects.

In most cases, data can be efficiently represented in two-dimenions, be it  
graph or grid.

I'm not knocking more complex relationships but very often, a 2D  
presentation is the most efficient. (Multiple 2D presentations, based on  
context, typically.)



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list