Hi Mike,
Thanks again for going through all the stuff last night at the WONOVA
meeting. I really like getting the behind the scenes look at what
could be coming up with the dev tools.
I'm copying this to the WOProject list because I think others may have
valuable input on this as well.
Andrew Kinnie and I had a couple beers (I know, shocking) after the
meeting last night and we started discussing some of the stuff you
went over last night and your desire to make WOLips as beginning-user-
friendly as possible. We came up with a few things that, from our
perspective, are the confusing or daunting aspects of WO development
for the beginner.
Now that the tools are getting much more polished in their look and
feel, the big barrier to WO-newbies is now becoming questions like
"Which EOGenerator should I use?" and "Do I want Apple or Wonder
Inline Bindings?", let alone "What the heck are Inline-bindings?".
Right now, once a new developer decides to use WebObjects they are
faced with so many subsequent questions that there is no way they can
possibly have the answer to yet, and no matter what they pick someone
is going to suggest doing it differently. On top of that, it's only
getting more complicated with two different kinds of AJAX soon to be
available.
We think there are a couple key things that could streamline this
process for WOnder applications.
1) Fully embrace WOnder in a WOnder App. Make the default setup of a
WOnder application implement click-to-open and as many of the other
WOnder technologies as possible right out of the starting-gate. If
someone wants to pick-and-choose the pieces of WOnder that they use,
let them start with a standard WO application and add things from
there, or remove unwanted things from the default WOnder app. Don't
make the default a half-way thing!
2) Hide the Binding Style form the beginner. Abstract the modification
of Components using a "projection" as you talked about last night. The
editing UI for editiing a Component would be the same for all tag
styles (inline, WOD or mixed) and WOLips would take care of making the
modifications to the HTML or WOD. You could always edit them directly
with a text editor if you're anal like that, but the default editor
would completely hide where the bindings are being written. A
preference change could change where bindings were written, but it
wouldn't change the editing UI. This, combined with the drag-and-drop
binding functionality would make Component Editor much less
complicated for the beginner, but still allow the advanced developer
to do what they need to.
3) Make the Bindings tab part of the WOLips perspective by default.
4) (this one's mine, and I brought it up before but haven't yet added
a feature request for it) Watch what classes the focus is on in
the .java editor and instead of having the Related tab showing just
the EOModel, have it show and possibly make available for editing, the
EOModel properties, attributes and relationships, etc. for the
selected class's entity, which would help break the disconnect between
the model and the class, and likely greatly reduce the amount of times
you need to actually open the whole model (and therefor switch
perspectives - which can be quite disturbing to Eclipse newbies).
What do other developers, especially beginners, think?
After some discussion, I'll be happy to submit feature requests.
Dave
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Thu Jul 17 2008 - 11:36:02 EDT