On 21/07/2007, at 6:01, Chuck Hill wrote:
>> In the project I am converting to WOLips, there are many hundreds
>> of EO entities. I do not need Java classes for more than half of
>> them, so I don't have them.
>
> If you don't need Java classes, what are they for? They just hold
> data and there is no logic? At the very least, I'd regard basing
> your application on dictionaries and KVC as ill advised. Have fun
> refactoring!
Yes, around half of the entities in this framework have no logic.
They are mostly join tables and other things that are really simple,
such as types of things (page type, product type, where the customer
found out about the vendor etc) and other things that really need no
logic, such as ranges of postcodes that are valid for each state-- in
fact states themselves need no logic.
I believe that it is perfectly valid to have an application and a
development environment that allows you to build entities like this
without getting in your way by demanding that you have Java classes.
In fact I would go so far as to say that when developing the part of
the application that uses these items directly (eg for editing the
postcode ranges for each state), I couldn't care less whether it used
Java, C or whatever-- because I don't want to see that detail.
Anything that distracts me from the model and the interface and drags
me down into implementation details will inevitably reduce my
productivity.
>
>
>
>> I know you are going to tell me to use EOGenerator to
>> automatically generate classes for all entities. But I don't yet
>> know how to do that, and it doesn't seem right to me that a
>> newcomer to WOLips can't make an error-free project without having
>> to learn many arcane (and not strictly necessary) tools.
>
> Many decisions were made to not support what was considered bad
> practice (like having classes in the default package). Maybe that
> was a bad decision as there seem to be a number of people, um,
> doing this. On the flip side of things, XCode / EOModeler / WO
> Builder allowed a lot of invalid data and encouraged sloppy habits
> that will come back to haunt you later. The WOLips tools help you
> find these sooner rather than later. You could just turn off
> binding validation...
No, I don't want to turn off binding validation. I want the tool to
support me as much as possible, doing what it does best--
painstakingly going through every detail of the project and warning
me when it finds something wrong. My problem is that it is reporting
things (well, 4000 things) that are not wrong. EOGenericRecord is a
perfectly valid class to use for an entity without logic, and WOLips
tells me that every single binding for every single EOGenericRecord
is an error.
My logic (and thus for my employees) has always been that you only
generate a Java class when you need business logic. Some of the
employees got their knuckles rapped for generating classes just for
user interface shortcuts, but WOOgnl has made that unnecessary
(although some business logic crept into the user interface that way).
Unless there is some WOLips fix for EOGenericRecord, I will learn how
to use EOGenerator. But I don't have to like it, and I especially
dislike the way WOLips and the WOLips developers in general push me
towards writing code and editing text instead of focussing on the
goals of the project at a high level.
Thomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Fri Jul 20 2007 - 16:29:24 EDT