Monday, April 16, 2007
Himalia - User Interface Builder
When someone ask me the typical "what are you doing?" question I have two possible responses.
I'm doing a software product for software developers, you won't understand.
This is the typical answer to my father, my sister and my girlfriend (my mother doesn't ask me, she already knows I'm playing with the computer). But it works, and nobody keep asking and it is the idea ;)
On the other hand, for the computer guys my answer has changed in the last year.
At the beginning, I defined Himalia as a language for service-oriented user interfaces. It's still the definition you can see in the index page of the website. But it had a problem: nobody knew what it was and they used to say something like: "aaahh". Nobody has ever asked me a second question, but it wasn't the idea here ;)
Then, Andrés Aguiar, defined it as a model-driven tool for user interfaces.
The first time I read it I found it simplified, but then... I understood. You can't say everything in the first sentence, and really you don't want to do it. When you try, you loose the chance to get the people interested. Although this definition doesn't define the technology and focuses only in the tool (Himalia Guilder), it's a very good introduction that everybody understand.
But now, my new answer is that Himalia is a user interface builder, that is the guilder definition after all. Why? I don't want to carry on the Himalia's shoulders all the problems of the model-driven tools' history. Himalia wasn't made just for modeling, it was made for modeling and running a user interface; for the specification time, the design time but also for the runtime. We want something else that writing down the models in a paper and admire them, that is the purpose of most of the formal modeling languages. So, this definition make sense for the real Himalia goal: to build user interfaces. Simple.
Keep it in mind, Himalia is a user interface builder, and more, Himalia is the user interface builder, until someone copy us.
Yes. I'm one of the "computer guys" that answers "aaahh" without a full understand of what you (you and Gabriel in the begining) were doing. In that moment i keep my mouth closed, but my mind started working.
I'm tryed to keep Himalia's track, but for people without almost any backgruond in user interfaces and all the stuff arround the project (like me), read about patterns, semantic web, Rails, models, Tesla motors, WPF, hypermedia, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, DSL, Vista, service-oriented things, etc. send me very close nowhere...
Surely you are rigth: Himalia is a user interface builder. That's the point to start for people who want to put on track...
With that in mind, i should sit down and start reading the documentation again... ;)
BTW: 'El blog de Manolete' is in the ether... nothing about user interfaces yet...
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