On 2/11/09 7:55 PM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
Or we can go with some hybrid approach of having an Eclipse plugin exchanging events with the Modeler. Not sure if we can make the user experience as nice, we'll have to support 2 tools instead of 1, and we'll have to support an extra messaging layer. But this is probably less work overall...
Well, there already is an ugliness that quite a bit of Modeler specific code lives in the main Cayenne jar. So pulling that out into a ui-core library is probably the first step. Should the main Cayenne jar even know how to *write* the model into an XML file?
Or we can write an Eclipse plugin in parallel with the Modeler and provide both as independent tools... Such internal competition will be a resource drain though. So nothing is free, and these are some hard choices... I am sort of in favor of the last one, as even an initial plugin prototype will show whether we can have significant usability improvements, without being a full Modeler replacement.
My thought is that it is just so much work to maintain two, that one will always be inferior and eventually die. Is there a possibility to work with the WOlips people on this? And they are sure to chip in on the idea of writing a GUI ERDiagram tool. But is EOF just too different to make it work? I too like the basic concept of an Eclipse based tool. Sure we'll annoy a bunch of IDEA/Netbeans users, but they can still fire up Eclipse to use the modeler. Maybe it is 120Mb larger than CayenneModeler, but it still would work. Ari Maniatis -- --------------------------> Aristedes Maniatis GPG fingerprint CBFB 84B4 738D 4E87 5E5C 5EFA EF6A 7D2E 3E49 102A
