On 21/07/2007, at 6:43, Anjo Krank wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> I can think if a lot of things to reply, but will only suggest here
> that you download PDE and add support for EOGenericRecord yourself.
> It's probably not even that hard to do.
>
> Cheers, Anjo
Um, what's PDE? Google gives me lots of pages with WOLips and PDE in
them, where they talk about PDE without saying what it is...
But I will take the path of least resistance. I will learn to use
EOGenerator with WOLips (which I had to do anyway), and generate a
hundred or so unnecessary Java files (which I believe won't be any
harder than generating Java files for only some of the entities).
Look, I know I might sound ungrateful, using the tools generated for
free by so many amazing and dedicated people and then complaining
when they aren't right. I have two beefs:
<rant>
- one is that Apple is forcing me into the path of using open source
when the existing tools are more than adequate to give me a serious
productivity advantage over my competitors who use different
technologies;
- the other is that I believe that there is a philosophical bias in
the whole WOLips approach to WebObjects development that reflects the
interests of those who developed it: the approach to almost every
development task seems to be to write Java code or edit text files
(although Entity Modeler is a brilliant counter-example to this).
This might be appropriate for programmers, who love to write code,
but one of the main competitive advantages of WO for me is that it
allows me, as the project manager, to rapidly whip up a demonstration
system for the customer without writing any code, using visually-
oriented tools (OK, now I am showing my bias-- like half the planet I
am visually oriented rather than textual). Then when the customer
buys in to the project, I (or my staff) can then use the very same
development tools and the very same prototype to develop a world-
class enterprise application. I used to joke with my staff that we
were trying to achieve zero lines of code per day-- meaning that if
they were writing code instead of using the high-level tools, they
were probably going in the wrong direction. It seems to me that the
path of least resistance with WOLips is to dive into code and the
lower level details. Although Entity Modeler is a great tool and
appears to do everything I used to to in EOModeler, there are no high-
level visually-oriented tools in WOLips. And judging by the responses
to recent discussions about a WO Builder replacement, there are many
people who feel the same need.
</rant>
Again, I am not criticising all the amazing people who have
contributed so much to this powerful tool. Unfortunately I am not in
a position to contribute to the tool (other than, eg, paying for a
copy of a WO Builder replacement) because I am in the middle of
rolling out a big project while at the same time learning a very
complex development environment to be used on the next project. I am
just trying to give some of my hard-won "don't get lost in the
details" experience to this community.
Thomas
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Fri Jul 20 2007 - 17:16:22 EDT