I've always been interested in the design process of applications. Design broadly defined as 'how to translate an idea or business objective all the way down into a working app'.
I find that there is a lack of formal and well-defined methodologies which cover this process. Methodologies which go above and beyond wire-frames and mock-ups.
A while ago I started to put some effort into this and I have been trialling and developing a novel design paradigm, to see if it works.
The result is a model based method, which ideally can be used to create working applications as well.
The current state (maybe some 60% of what I originally had in mind) is described on https://lynkfs.design
A quick rundown :
Any app requires one or more models, each describing certain aspects.
The set of possible aspect models is described on the website.
By way of quick demo, let's model and create a skeletal 'forum' app.
This app requires at least a process model.
The rules for the main process within this model are :
- every forum user needs to be logged in
- every forum user can add posts
- only authors can edit or delete their own posts
- every forum user can add comments to any post
These descriptive rules are parsed into a network graph, see image attached.
This concludes the modelling exercise.
To make this into a working application requires node specification.
Nodes in this graph are processing nodes, and can contain code, or forms, or neural nets.
Executing this graph :
The first node checks if the user has previously been authorised for this process
If not it proceeds to the login node which fires up a login-form
Otherwise, or after log-in, the show-posts node gets control
etc.
Forms can be made with the online form builder.
There is a full set of drag and drop components available.
The resulting demo app, for brevity limited to the first couple of nodes :
https://lynkfs.design/Web/forms/AnyCode_Exec/index.html?user=admin&prog=forum2
(login with 'guest', 'go')
Note :
Although some of the modellers and tools are working well enough, I'm not publishing them for the time being.
Some more work needs to be done on the remaining unfinished modellers and especially on the node specification side.
If there is some interest, I'll update lynkfs.design with more demo's and video's.
Have you looked at some node.js server-side code for this?
I did. Looked at bun.js as well. Node works well for many use cases, especially where functions need to be centralised, like db access, messaging and the like. The disadvantages are that node does not run on my server domains (and yes I can probably find a suitable supplier), and that node servers need explicit mechanisms to fire them up. Also going against the grain a bit, I like to keep things client-side (heretical, I know, but it does have advantages)
