Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
robert burrell donkin wrote:
<snip>
i've been playing around with some code for a day or two
(http://people.apache.org/~rdonkin/tool.html). it's just hacked
together but hopefully it'll serve as an illustration and act as a
lightning rod for ideas. (it'll try to explain where i see it fitting
into the bigger picture later.) so please criticise the concepts not
the coding :)
Looks very cool to me, Robert! It'd be easy to translate your
<class-model> structure into JiBX binding terms, too.
I've thought about the issue of sample instances you mention on the
page, but don't have any good answers. It'd be easy to do something
for simple bean/struct classes - but that breaks down when you get to
complex structures (think hashmaps, for instance). Allowing serialized
instances to be loaded is the only thing I can think of that will work
over a wide range of objects. Or perhaps unmarshalling an XML document
to create instances? That way people could generate an initial XML and
start editing it, then have the changes reflected in the object state.
I think editing the initial XML then marshalling it is probably the best
way. Although I'm not convinced that something more than sample values
are needed to see what the XML looks like.
If this tool is integrated tightly with an IDE there are probably some
good components that we could leverate to allow inspection of types like
HashMaps or beans.
- Dan
--
Dan Diephouse
Envoi Solutions LLC
http://netzooid.com
