On Jul 17, 2008, at 8:36 AM, David Avendasora wrote:
> 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)
Only shocking if you stopped at two.
> 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!
+1
> 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.
Not really sure what Mike is on about, but +1 anyway.
> 3) Make the Bindings tab part of the WOLips perspective by default.
+1
> 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).
Interesting idea!
> What do other developers, especially beginners, think?
>
> After some discussion, I'll be happy to submit feature requests.
Not much discussion here! :-)
Chuck
--Practical WebObjects - for developers who want to increase their overall knowledge of WebObjects or who are trying to solve specific problems. http://www.global-village.net/products/practical_webobjects
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