7 June 2005

User-scripted windows

A co-worker is working on a VB form that reads custom XML files that define layout and validation. It will communicate with a back-end database and the layout will presumably be tweaked by the customer. This is an extremely common task. In my previous job, I wrote a system on CE that used HTML for layout, XML for data, and JavaScript for validation (sadly, I just heard that upon my leaving, it was declared "unuseable" by the other programmer on the project and completely rewritten). Before that, I worked at a company whose main product was an IDE that allowed users to design and script windows for simulations. The goal in both of those was to allow the client to create applications within a limited domain and with varying levels of complexity. It's unfortunate that these tools probably cannot be made generic enough for portability between projects. That "limited domain" is always so different that very little intersection exists.

[ posted by sstrader on 7 June 2005 at 1:22:27 PM in Programming ]