I was reading through a post from Rocky Lhotka today and ran across this quote. Despite my taking this quote out of the context of the post, it is still valid and something that I have been struggling to truely understand and implement in my day to day development:
There's nothing more expensive over the life of an application than a line of code in the UI.
At first glance, there's no rocket science here - nothing new or out of the ordinary. It's only when you get down to the actual implementation of this in your daily code writing that it becomes new or extraordinary. Think about it for a while - how would you actually implement an event driven application, whether in Windows or on the web, with as few lines of code directly in the UI as possible? How do you code an application's UI to be responsive yet allow that UI to be completely overhauled, reconstructed, or even become nonexistent (converting to an SOA, API, or command line interface, for example)? I've done some reading, recently, about the Model View Presenter pattern and this seems like a good place to start. The journey of learning to write code in this manner is a long one for me - too many years of writing RAD applications. Fortunately, I'm surrounded by a bunch of young developers who are only beginning to form their development habbits. Getting them to change is easy compared to getting me to change. :)