> On Jan 8, 2016, at 2:49 AM, Aristedes Maniatis <a...@maniatis.org> wrote: > > On 8/01/2016 4:40am, Andrus Adamchik wrote: >> The argument in favor of a fresh UI toolkit is that our Swing app feels >> stale, and this becomes a serious mental barrier to adoption. I have no idea >> how much JavaFX would help to modernize it, but overall it seems like a >> logic *upgrade* path. > > Perhaps just replacing all the icons with new ones (from one of the many good > libraries), and adding @2x versions (Retina) of those icons would go about > 80% of the way to making it feel modern. > > How do you like: > > http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
This will be a good start I guess. Another thing is bevels and general look of controls. Is that something that is easy to customize in JavaFX with CSS? > >> Next I'd like to see the modeling process to be less tedious, with the tool >> better hiding modeling complexities. Currently we are attacking that >> indirectly by doing an end run around manual modeling [1] by beefing up >> reverse engineering. > > Can you quantify which bits are tedious? To be honest, its been ages since > I've created a large model from scratch. Attributes and relationships presentation and mapping. To many clicks, not enough information in the main table (and trying to add extra columns using current Swing toolkit makes it too overloaded). ObjRelationship path mapping is the most unintuitive part of it. (This is being addressed per [1], which allows to do path mapping straight from the dropdown). As others have mentioned, combining Obj and Db views should also help. So we need some UX rework. Andrus [1] https://github.com/apache/cayenne/pull/77
