The visual age and architecture or who will save me from endless grid views?

Today most of system split into layers with visual layer (UI) that responsible for formatting and displaying data to the user. Beneath UI layers responsible for application logic and data management. This concept pushes many of us to believe that visual layers are just simple formatting of data therefore can be easily recreate in each system against other system layers to show data. Right?

Well in our world today, more and more data gathered by systems and display to the user, but it seems that the conventional data displaying as they are today reaching their limit. You saw once, for sure, user sitting in front of endless grid (that holds hundreds or millions of rows) and trying to figure out what is going on there. As I see it we are not far away from other visual solutions. For now link analysis systems already introduces other visualization methods other then data grids. I don’t know how new system visualization will be like (otherwise I probably was busy with new start-up : -) ) but I’m positive sure that systems UI layers will contain complicated algorithm that responsible for presentation aspects of the system. When system UI will hold complicated “visual logic” other systems UI layer can’t reproduce given systems UI.  Systems not rewriting other systems business logic or system data, they just using other systems layers to get data and business logic and this rule will be enforce on UI layer as well.

So when you set system architecture I strongly recommend taking in account that system visualization, of your system or other system that you using, might be change to complicate “visual logic”. Make sure that your architecture can adopt those changing.