Naked Objects Applied

Another great presentation from Eitan Suez full of live demonstrations. Naked Objects is a fun framework that seeks to automatically generate your presentation and persistence layers from your model classes. The buzzword of choice is “radical simplification,” which Eitan supported by a great quote:

If anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupry

Overall, I was disappointed by Naked Objects. It made for a slick demo of rapid interface generation, but so does Visual Studio, or Access for that matter.

The real disappointment was how clothed the naked objects really are. The Naked Objects team doesn’t appear to subscribe to the Spring framework philosophy that dependancies are considered harmful. Your model classes must be tightly coupled to the framework. Perhaps this will be more acceptable if the framework evolves to support production applications, rather than merely slick prototypes.

In any event, Eitan’s enthusiasm for expressive frameworks is contagious. I’m not going to be using Naked Objects in the near future, but I did walk away with a sense of having glimpsed the future of business application development.