Naked Objects

The Naked Objects Book, by Richard Pawson, Robert Matthews: [ISBN 0470844205] and framework that implements it are described on the page The Naked Objects Framework.

There are important differences between The Naked Objects Framework and Auto Gen Crud Screens.

This seems somewhat similar to Robert Heinlein's descriptions of gay deceiver in his book The Number Of The Beast. This computer is programmed (and used) by voice by directly interacting with its object models (before its Turing capacity was established, then it was just another crew member :-)). Of course talking to the machine required the operator to learn its language. But it was very flexible and powerful.

On the literary theme, there is also the island in Gullivers Travels, where the inhabitants do not use words, but rather point directly to objects. This unfortunately necessitates them carrying around large knapsacks containing all the objects they might need to refer to in a conversation. -- Richard Pawson

You know, the kind that expose their privates. -> RTFM: they only expose their publics :)

Bit Torrent uses a naked object-like interface. Or, as it calls it, no interface at all. The application leaves everything but the basics of the interface up to the users, the OS, and third party application developers to decide. Unfortunately, these other people aren't anywhere near as smart as the maker of Bit Torrent so those other parts of the UI are miserable.

As a result, installing, running and controlling the "application" are transparent non-existent process while opening and closing torrents are all perfectly elegant. Meanwhile, suffering repeated timeout messages (OS responsibility) or finding the torrents on a web server (third-party developer responsibility) are absolute pains.

The lesson to be learned from this? It wasn't enough to provide the low-level objects with naked interfaces, you must also provide all the higher-level objects (eg, searches in a P2P app) on the same footing. So if you're smart enough to use naked objects, just remember that everyone else is an idiot.

...and doesn't know it: Unskilled And Unaware Of It

Even more naked: a Command Line Interface that the user would use to call the object and desired method as arguments from the Command Line:

No GUI required.

Microsoft has a text shell designed to manipulate objects, its had a number of names: Monad, msh, and now released as Power Shell.

This is just Self Language implemented in Java Language. www.vanderburg.org www.smalltalk.org.br www.smalltalk.org.br

Interesting trivia on the origins of our use of the word naked. Cs Lewis (I forgot which book) pointed out that the act of peeling an orange was called "naking" the orange. To Nake, was to remove the covering. Once the covering was removed, the object was now "naked". -- Bruce Pennington

That may be a factoid, not a fact. etymonline.com has cognates to "naked" going back to Gothic, and etymologies back to PIE. None smell like a transitive verb.

Or you could look up nake www.etymonline.com

Category Interaction Design

See original on c2.com