pcplantdb

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> Johns - can you please clarify the terms UI and frontend for us (me)?

Briefly, IMO and in general:

"Front End" refers to the entire "client" portion of a "client-server"
system.
That is, the front end is all the software that is used to communicate -
through some sort of defined means of communication - with the server or
"back end" portion of a client-server system.

A web browser is one ubiquitous example of a client application - it is a
"front end" for whatever web application one asks it to talk to (google,
yahoo!, PIW, whatever... :-).

A "User Interface" is just that portion of any software that enables the
user to interface with ("use") the program to do whatever it is the
particular program does.

So a front end that is any use to humans includes some sort of user
interface.

However, a user interface is (almost) never the entire front end - it is
an element or component or portion of the front end (from a developer
perspective anyhow).

A front end provides certain functionality to users (searching for and
displaying plant data from a database, for example).
There can be many different ways of presenting this functionality to those
users.
A character (text) based command line is one way.
A character based graphical UI with checkboxes and entry fields and
buttons and so on is another way.
A mouse-and-keyboard raster-graphics (dots on the screen that make a
recognizable image) UI of some sort with images and colors and checkboxes
and buttons and entry fields and so on is another way.
And so on...

So the UI is how the user actually "uses" (interacts with) the
functionality of the program.

The front end is the chunk(s) of software that talk(s) to the back end,
assuming a system that is built on a client(front end)-server(back-end)
model.

There can be multiple front ends for a given back end - I recall we have
already agreed to design for this possibility as we build our system.

There can also be multiple user interfaces - one per front end, or more
than one per front end if so desired.

Questions?


John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net