Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
- Subject: Re: WO Builder, Marketing etc...
- From: Mike Schrag <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 22:40:48 -0400
I think you have a lot of great points, Thomas, and to be clear, my
comments about a WOB replacement are meant to be "if we're going to
do it, let's do it better". I see a great value for a tool that
works the way WOB COULD work. I personally think it has a lot of
problems as a dynamic component builder as it currently stands, but I
think there are many techniques that could be applied to making an
app like this even better.
The point I am trying to make is that WOBuilder is my primary
development tool. Not because of its WYSIWYG capabilities, which
really suck. I must emphasise the distinction between WYSIWYG and
"Visual Development."
Several people made similar comments to me as well at Eclipse ... And
I think that _even in our current text-based system_ in Eclipse, we
can make this more readily accessible (independent of potentially
moving forward with another more visually-oriented app).
- shows me a logical hierarchy of the elements in my components;
This is definitely something we can add (I can't recall what the
Outline view ends up looking like in Component Editor in Eclipse, but
it can definitely be tweaked up to be better).
- allows me to inspect and edit them and their bindings (that is
their communication API with the parent component);
There have been a couple of ideas tossed around in WOLips about
this. If you are inside of the WOD { }'s, doing a completion on a
blank line will show you a list of all available bindings (not unlike
the inspector panel), but there's also no reason we couldn't do a
fancier editor for WOD that is more like the inspector panel (we have
a full-on WOD model that supports validation in Eclipse, so it's just
a matter of going through some motions with UI ideas). Some of the
issues with the current inspector panel in WOB is that it's slightly
misleading, because in reality it's actually a TREE (rather than a
list) of bindings that can co-exist based on the definition of
validation rules. I think this is something that could be made much
cooler in a new editor that has the opportunity to rethink some of
this stuff.
- possibly most important of all, it provides me with a schema
browser that allows me to visually drill down into all the objects
in the system and choose appropriate attributes and methods, and
link those to components in the page.
In a project with a couple of hundred persistent entities, code
completion is not very useful to me. The ability to click on an
entity and get a list of all its methods is fundamental to the way
I work. (of course a popup of the Javadoc would be a fantastic
improvement...)
I totally agree on the Javadoc part, which I need to integrate in
completion, but I'm not sure we're talking the same thing. I have
projects with tons of entities, and code completion lets me see the
list of available KVC bindings at each "dot" in the keypath.
Meaning, I do specifically what you're talking about, but instead of
having a browser always visible, I just cmd-space at the dot in a
keypath and a popup appears showing me the available methods (if i do
a completion request right after the "=" in a binding definition, it
shows all of the reachable KVC keypaths on the component that I'm
currently in).
And lastly, although I have written millions of lines of Java, I do
it less and less these days because it is NOT the most productive
way to get the project finished. I find that almost any effort
expended in finding ways to avoid writing code pays off in reduced
overall development time.
This may be the crux of the heated debate. Programmers (as opposed
to those who have responsibility for delivering a finished product
on time and on budget) will naturally focus on coding efficiency.
But that is only a small part of the project.
For WebObjects to move forward without WOBuilder, we need a
visually-oriented tool that does the three things I described
above. I am sure that some people don't need it, but many people
do. To say that only newbies and klutzes use WOBuilder is an insult
to many experienced developers, and I believe it shows a focus on
the narrow coding issues rather than the overall productivity.
We had a similar debate on the Wonder list a couple weeks ago re:
Xcode v Eclipse when it comes to the utility of Java productivity
features vs just not writing Java at all. Obviously if you can avoid
writing code entirely, that's awesome, but at least for me, there's
still a fairly large amount of code that has to get written and
Eclipse is an EXCELLENT platform for that. I don't mean to imply
that "newbies and klutzes" use WOB at all, but this same analogy
about "programmers may care about code, but if they knew how to
deliver a real product they would see the light" kind of thing also
showed up in the Wonder debate, and I find it equally insulting
(touche! :) ).
Look, we all have the goal of delivering various solutions, ideally
that actually work (and on-time, and on-budget, etc). There are
several different methodologies that people use to do so. I
recognize that using a code-completing/validating text-editor for
WO's is NOT everyone's preferred workflow and something LIKE a WOB
has value, but I think we need to consider what a more ideal WOB
would look like (one that doesn't have some of the very obvious
limitations that WOB has -- even as someone who prefers the visual
style of building, I'm sure you run into the same issues I do when
working with WOB) and not limit ourselves to how it does things now.
So to reiterate -- I LIKE the concept of WOB, I just don't like how
it delivers on its promise. Obviously people get real things done in
it, and I think that's great, but I think we can do even better.
I hope that my focus on alternative development approaches and
overall project efficiency can serve as some kind of positive
contribution.
I think this is very valuable ... It was part of the point I was
making in one of my posts earlier that contribution to the project
comes in forms not necessarily counted in lines of code. It reminds
me that we went to the Apple UI design lab at WWDC, and one of the
design guys there spent just 15 minutes or so looking at one of our
apps, just with a different perspective, and I came out of it with a
ton of great ideas for making it a better product.
ms
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