Naked Objects is a pattern and a framework for creating applications that expose the business objects directly in the user interface.
It provides strong encapsulation of the objects, while still having a data-oriented flair.
The Naked Objects Group has some high profile clients, such as the Department of Social and Family Affairs (DSFA) in Ireland. From the case study:
This system is now intensively used by more than a 100 clerical and management staff, generating more than 250,000 transactions per day. Since May 2006 it has issued more than €1bn in pension entitlements - a mission critical system by any standards. [...]
The previous Child Benefit system, written just five years ago, ran to more than 50,000 lines of business code. A year ago, we claimed to the DSFA management that by re-using the business object model we had created for the Pensions system it should be possible to create the brand new Child Benefit system using less than 1000 lines of custom code (written in VB.Net - the DSFA’s preferred language). When functional development was completed on July 31st, the final tally was 957 lines!
Naked Objects is similar to the golden oldie Oval, from MIT's Center for Coordination Science.
Oval stands for Objects, Views, Agents and Links, and like Naked Objects is a very inspiring system.
The basic idea of Oval is called radical tailorability: once you give your users a few expressive building blocks, they can create their applications for themselves.
Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links. We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary "tailoring language" out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users.
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