More notes on the Internet information client product that I am working on:
I am designing this using MVC (i.e., Model-View-Controller) - this allows me to efficiently develop GUI-less code for accessing information using RSS feeds and public SOAP services like Google and Amazon. This GUI-less code is the 'Model'.
The big win in using MVC is that it is fairly simple to write different Controller and View component pairs for both local GUI applications and for a web services interface.
I think that MVC helps in strategically planning software development. I started my Internet appliance project by sketching out what I want the user interface to look like and what information I want display and what controls the user has over the application. This allowed me to specify the public API for the 'Model' classes that I will eventually need when I develop the standalone application GUI and the web services GUI. Once this process is done, I forget about the GUIs for a long time, concventrating on the design and implementation of the 'Model' classes.
If you like this software process, then you will probably like my next Free Web Book ('The Software Design Book"), which, by-the-way, I was working on yesterday. I feel a little guilty charging forward with a new web book when I have had an unfiinished chapter (for a long time!) in my free Java/AI web book. I hate to admit it, but I am stuck with a program bug in the last example for my Java/AI web book: I am using a Hidden Markov Model approach to writing a part of speech tagger (making it as simple as possible so it will be easy to understand) - but there is a bug in the code - eventually, I will get back to it and finalize the free Java/AI book.
8:09:23 AM 
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