"after certain tests and tries, we believed that Visual WebGui was the tool we dreamed about for developing such data dense Web-based solutions… The proven unhackable security and the ease of deployment and update totally relieve our worries and saved us tremendous labor and budget," Huichuan Duan, Chief Developer.
Overview
Lifestyle China is a qualitative design research project, led by Mr. Benny Ding Leong, a designer and the leader of the Asian Lifestyle Design Research Lab of the School of Design in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
The project aims to establish a broad-brush understanding of five essential aspects of everyday life (dwelling, food, communication, leisure and clothing) and the related consumption in China, and how these practices of consumption reflect the material lifestyle and eco-awareness of affluent Chinese people in 10 cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Tianjin, Shenyang, and Zhengzhou.
Lifestyle China Database system is designed to accommodate, store and disseminate the large variety and quantity of data surveyed in the project. This database can serve Hong Kong, the mainland, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University as a whole to help designers and industry to design appropriate and innovative products especially fitting to the Chinese. PolyU and the mainland design students will benefit from this database by learning, analyzing and researching the information from angles and views they interest.
Business needs
The Lifestyle China Database system should be Web-based with an interface in desktop look and feel which is highly expected by the users and customers since it is a heavily data dense application. "Playing data with widgets that resemble the desktop counterparts, not only in look and feel but also in functionality and action comfort users with nearly dummy interaction and natural thinking" stated Huichuan Duan, the chief developer, a professor in computer science from the School of Information Science and Engineering, Shandong Normal University, China.
Most of the users and customers prefer manipulating data inside one single window frame to page flow paradigm which is very common in traditional Web applications. As a result, it was required to create a system which is similar to a native Windows based application but can run over the Web.
As a qualitative design research project targeting lifestyle, the survey data are extremely diversified and uncommon. Their raw form is very different from the 2-D table structure which is the basic building blocks of the predominating relational database. Also, people in the design world, who are the major target users of this project, expected to see data in a more expressive and visual form than the common computerized form. Therefore, the system must be designed with rich UI elements and strong interactive mechanisms.
Implementing a rich-interactive and data-dense Web application needs a new development platform that can support quick interface design not only in layouting interface elements but also, more importantly, in logic implementation. VWG platform, in a spirit of quick building rich, reliable and secure Web application in desktop way, can do much more than our project requiring.
The Solution
In the earlier design stage in spring 2009, the development team considered using traditional page flow based paradigms to design and implement this system. However, the developers were not satisfied with that because page flow based Web application interface was not a perfect solution to such a data dense mission. As a result the team sought to design and implement a Web-based database application in a flavor of desktop, at least to some certain extent, because the matured desktop database application paradigm had been proved to be the perfect solution for data dense projects.
As the team were searching for a more innovative and appropriate development tool which would allow them to develop Web applications in a more natural way, Visual WebGui came into their sight. Although Visual WebGui was at its earlier stage at that time, it strongly attracted the team with its unique, bold and feasible paradigm. They began to evaluate it and "after certain tests and tries, we believed that Visual WebGui was the tool we dreamed about for developing such data dense Web-based solutions," stated Huichuan Duan.
"With VWG platform, we can design a complex Web data-dense interface in just the way we are familiar with in designing a rival desktop application, in both the front interface elements layouting and the backend coding," said Huichuan Duan and added that "The proven unhackable security and the ease of deployment and update totally relieve our worries and saved us tremendous labor and budget."
During the development process the team was deeply impressed by the Visual WebGui rich desktop-like interface widgets layouting, easy user control creating and easy data populating and manipulating. The team however, was even more impressed with the easy backend coding it allows. "as professional developers, we would like to honor VWG more on its backends: easy and quick coding and logic implementing, transparent proven unhackable security, and the incredible desktop-like Web application development paradigm as a whole."
Benefits
Choosing to base the Lifestyle China Database system on Visual WebGui allowed achieving a rich interactive data-dense application while implementing the desired desktop-like look and feel. Not only did it provide familiar UI functionalities for users and customers but also allow a desktop-like performance for a data dense Web-based solution. As a data intensive research application, security was also a crucial issue which was entirely solved by the Visual WebGui by-design empty client architecture.
Furthermore, achieving those requirements made possible in a quick and graceful matter due to the Visual WebGui innovative paradigm which contributed to the easy Web application coding and logic implementation and eventually to significantly saving labor and development time. Simplicity and saving was also noticed when it came to the deployment process which uses almost no more knowledge than deploying ASP.NET applications and to the fact that there was no need to find a security solution due to the fact that Visual WebGui is proven to be unhackable. In addition, the seamless integration with Visual Studio.NET and microsoft.NET technologies enables .NET developers to develop VWG applications in almost no extra learning.
"As a research-oriented and nonprofit project, we honor VWG more on its fast Web application development and labor saving. To our experience, using VWG can roughly save half the labor compared with the traditional page flow-oriented Web application development paradigm," summed up Huichuan Duan.
Screenshots
Desktop look-and-feel interface: icons, headered panels, tabbed page, lists, combo boxes, tables, dialog boxes, etc.
Desktop look-and-feel interface: tree views, uncommon text rich interface, etc.
Colored uncommon number rich interface
Uncommon nominal and proportional information interface