Just replace "<label text=" with
document.createElement("label"...
and you end up with the same. You always need to program language specific
code. That was the intension of the term "syntactic sugar". In which way you
persist your model is another debate.
I think the key is API and Tooling. And therefore EMF is the better choice.
To Ui storage:
Who says that XML is the best way to store your ui? - Another guy probably
wants to save his UI in a database or flat-file, or... EMF makes a flexible
ui-storage very easy.
Tom
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag
von [email protected]
Gesendet: Freitag, 9. Oktober 2009 14:26
An: E4 Project developer mailing list
Betreff: RE: AW: [e4-dev] Why XML UI is important for us
> I'm following very interested the discussion about UI on this list but
> I
don't understand the difference in quality about the declaration language of a
UI. To me it's absolutely irrelevant > if I declare a label with
> new Label(...
> or with
> <label text="..."
> That's syntactic sugar.
For me, the difference is fundamental.
The "new Label(..." is computer programming language (in this case Java)
dependent and computer programming language declaration.
And the "<label text="..." is declarative fonctional declaration which is
independent of computer programming language.
We can analyse the "<label text="..." very easily with others computer language
like C++, C" or JavaScript etc.) and it isn't the case of ""new Label(...".
On conclusion, the "<label text="..." is more universal et declarative than the
"new Label(..."
Kaiping FANG
Responsable Architecture des systèmes d’Information Systems Architecture
Manager CCR 31, rue de Courcelles
75008 PARIS – France
Tél : +33 (0) 1 44 35 38 01
Fax : +33 (0) 1 44 13 77 36
Mobile : +33 (0) 6 71 29 95 75
E-mail : [email protected]
www.ccr.fr
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|AW: [e4-dev] Why XML UI is important for us
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|[email protected]
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I'm following very interested the discussion about UI on this list but I don't
understand the difference in quality about the declaration language of a UI. To
me it's absolutely irrelevant if I declare a label with
new Label(...
or with
<label text="..."
That's syntactic sugar.
Your issues with developing UIs (Skill, Guideline,...) will not be resolved by
switching to a xml declared UI, they will be just moved.
The fact that people are more familiar with XML than with EMF/SWT/whatever
makes no sense, you also have to "learn" how to declare an UI in XML.
The problems in UI development is IMHO not the declaration syntax but the
separation of UI and the business domain. From my experience (I'm working as
architect also for insurance, authority,...) the best way to improve quality of
UIs is an enforced architecture to separate UI declaration (regardless of which
technology) and binding the UI to a domain model. But this is an issue in
architecture, not in technology. If you separate these two things you will
resolve most of your problems. Your lower skilled developers (whatever this
means) can use GUI-Designer-Tools to create the UI satisfying the guidelines
without knowing anything about the business-code. Then your application
developers can bind the model to the designed ui (with APIs like Riena or
Databinding).
Like I said, the challenges in UI development is not the UI itself, but the
integration into an application and the binding to a domain model.
Therefore Eclipse already provides very good frameworks and APIs. Take a look
at Riena; its mission is (among other things) to provide a framework for
building such applications.
The fact that EMF is IMHO a better choice for a declarative UI is diverse (many
advantages were already mentioned).
Take a look at the tools that are built upon EMF and compare them with tools
for raw XML editing. I think everybody has already searched for a typo within a
xml file. Creating new tools for EMF Models is also much simpler than for a xml
block (which is also essential for e4-tooling).
The next thing is that XML serialization is just another feature of EMF.
Everything you have declared in a XML file can be represented in an EMF Model,
so the discussion itself makes no sense due to the fact that XML is a subset of
EMF.
The assumption that XML is better for simple cases I cannot confirm from my
experience, also with development-teams that have no EMF experience it makes no
big difference.
Last but not least I still have a feedback for the current e4: Development with
e4 is a great new experience. Great work :)
Best Regards,
Tom Seidel
-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Im Auftrag
von [email protected]
Gesendet: Freitag, 9. Oktober 2009 12:10
An: E4 Project developer mailing list
Betreff: Re: [e4-dev] Why XML UI is important for us
[email protected] wrote:
> In my experience with XSWT (similar to XWT) and the EMF-based TM, XML
> is simple for simple cases, but very complex when the problem grows,
> while EMF is slightly more complex for the simple cases, but scales
> very well with increasing complexity.
In our insurance application developpment avec 1500 UI forms, we hava 90 % of
simple case and 10 % of complex case in UI developement.
We perfer the simplicity of XWT than the EMF based approch because there isn't
enough good skilled java developers in my team who can master EMF approch.
You have to know that the skill of programming of application developers is
very limited. But, they know very well the fonctionality of the applications.
So, the simplicity is one "must" for us.
Kaiping FANG
Systems Architecture Manager
CCR
31, rue de Courcelles
75008 PARIS – France
Tél : +33 (0) 1 44 35 38 01
Fax : +33 (0) 1 44 13 77 36
Mobile : +33 (0) 6 71 29 95 75
E-mail : [email protected]
www.ccr.fr
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