Quickly Adapt

Benefits for Developers

Whether the specification was lacking in depth, the customer is changing his or her mind constantly or the market suddenly shifted, during the course of any project changes inevitably are needed. PlatForm uniquely combines declarative development with a consistent JavaScript API and event system to help developers build applications that can be easily adapted.

A first cause of the improved maintainability is the fact that a Javeline application consists of far fewer lines of code (10k vs. 2k loc). Therefore any change will touch fewer lines. Consequentially, the potential for bugs is reduced, and less work needs to be done.

Let's go one step deeper. By declaring the application and only writing down goals, not methods, changing a goal becomes much easier. The complete administration needed to reach that goal is done by PlatForm. Think about maintaining state, the process of changing data and corresponding views on that data, recording changes that are later communicated to the server. These and many other activities are all implicit and change automatically when you change the goal written in the declarative JML (Javeline Markup Language).

The final important cause is essential to the strict separation of layers in Javeline PlatForm. This separation (as described in the JumpStart Guide) enables developers to reuse different parts of the layer just as CSS enables this for HTML and XSLT for XML. When set up correctly information exists only in a single place in the application and need only be changed once.

Over the years these features have been tweaked, and have enabled us to make changes in hours that would take other approaches days or even weeks. The best way to achieve this approach is to play with it yourself and experience it.