Fluent Interfaces
Martin Fowler has an interesting blog entry introducing Fluent Interfaces.
A thousand feet view of Fluent Interfaces is that it makes development in general purpose object oriented languages look more like programming in a natural language. Or more specifically more domain specific and “fluent”.
This is something that may gain popularity in the future, as the development community tries to minimize complexity in software development. Developing in the language of the domain focuses development on the domain logic and away from the machinery of the underlying technologies used to develop the application.
And on second thought may lead to new “fluent” oriented languages that specifically accommodate development with fluent interfaces. It will be interesting how the software development community reacts to fluent interfaces.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:50 am
Im not sure this is entirely new stuff. Peter Norgiv, in his Java IAQ (http://www.norvig.com/java-iaq.html#init2) proposed a similar usage of setters that return a value for class initialization. I first read this IAQ back in 1997 or 1998, so the concept of fluent interfaces certainly isnt new.
December 21st, 2005 at 12:36 pm
Right,
Not exactly new, but something we may need to focus on more.
A reply to fluent interfaces by Piers Crawley update on fluent interfaces is here:
http://www.bofh.org.uk/articles/2005/12/21/fluent-interfaces