I couldn’t not stop laughing when I read when I read @lex’s post “What Open UI does for you – and what not”. Those were some really funny but true lines and I couldn’t agree more with him. Here is some of the excerpts from his post.
Open UI does NOT teach you good manners: That you have to do yourself. What I have seen often is that when Open UI is introduced in a project, everyone gets so excited that all ‘good manners’ are thrown overboard. Business process analysis? Requirements mapping? Design? Source control? Forget it, we’ve got Open UI, so we do all the fancy stuff because we can do it. That of course is a recipe for disaster.
So True! In addition to that I would like to add another syndrome that I experienced myself during an Open UI project implementation. I call that syndrome as Open UI First. Before Open UI the normal way of thinking about a solution was or rather should be:
- Is declarative solution possible ?
- How can we achieve using configuration?
- Workflow VS Scripting?
- Business Service VS Object Scripting (BC or Applet)
- When all else fails find the appropriate event to script.
Once you start feeling confident in Open UI the first question that comes to mind is “Is it possible using PM or PR?”. This can lead to fragmented solutions where you end up writing scripts here and there in addition to creating PM and PR’s. Remember Open UI is just a layer on top of same old Siebel and the rules of solution have not changed yet (but I think they are going to change soon). Think in terms of Traditional Siebel and not Open UI.
It does NOT make you a web developer overnight: With Open UI, the typical Siebel developer can be easily overwhelmed with all the web technologies such as JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Oh, you wrote eScript for the last ten years? Jolly good but sorry, that does not make you a web developer even if you argue that JavaScript is based on the same standard (ECMA) as eScript. Most of us will have to start learning, not only the Open UI API but also web standards. And it’s better to start learning today than tomorrow.
The experts have spoken. If you don’t want to be a dinosaur in Siebel World then start learning these web technologies today and believe me these are relevant even if you think Siebel is dead. All leading platforms use these including Salesforce. I started learning it the day I first found about Siebel Open UI.
@lex has made some more really good points in his post and you can read the rest of the post here and I suggest, you read it carefully.