| Absolutely, I agree with everything you say here.
For me, I agree that WOBuilder has a certain "suckiness" factor to it. But it has several features that WOLips lacks such as drag-n-drop bindings that I'll definitely miss! And I'd definitely like to have SOME WYSIWYG layout abilities. Really, from what I can tell, what WOLips offers as a replacement to WOBuilder is nothing more than editing the files by hand.
Sadly I just feel that going from WOBuilder (as bad as it is) to WOLips is actually a step backwards in productivity. -- Galen Rhodes email@hidden
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
On Jan 21, 2007, at 7:17 PM, Clark Mueller wrote: The interesting thing about OG's graphing is that someone actually spent some time working on it for the most recent release of OG, to the point that it actually maps attributes now (where previously it only did the entity names). It would be nice if OG were to pop up a window asking how to build and layout the graph that it builds, giving more control over the formatting, etc. Personally, I like to print out my models on 3' x 6' charts, but I don't do it very often, because i don't care to sort through the generated graph and make it fit every single time. So OG is definitely a nice solution, and I'm glad to see that it's doing attributes now, but it has a few shortcomings (although some of these are probably general OG usage issues that I shouldn't be bringing up). Also, I assume that OG itself also uses the Cocoa-Java bridge, unless it's just reading the raw .plist files (anyone know?), so it may too end up a victim of the deprecation.I have mixed feelings about WOBuilder. It definitely needs serious help. Very serious help. But I personally must be missing why it's really THAT hard to strip some of the Cocoa-Java portions of these apps out of them and make them pure Objective-C. In EOModeler's case, I understand that it relies very heavily on the EOControl layer straight out of EOF, and in that case, Mike has obviously built what is basically a fully functional and, IMO, superior replacement to it. WOBuilder is a different beast. I fail to see why it relies heavily on Cocoa-Java APIs, and what prevents it from being updated to be pure Objective-C, getting its attribute and entity information, say, from parsing the .java source files and plist files in the EOModel based on a file change notification, for example.
Obviously I say all that without the benefit of any knowledge of the structure of the app, but it is a tool that I hate to see go away. For me, visual editing is in fact a big boost to my productivity. I will concede that it has certainly resulted in my developing better code, but hand coding still slows me down a great deal. I don't have a "design" team using GoLive and a "development" team using <insert IDE here> that work independently of one another. Apple does, and I think that its own internal development processes involving WebObjects have been adversely affecting development of WOBuilder for a while. What would be kind of nice is if they released the source code for WOBuilder to PW, let's say, so that the community could try tackling this issue. I can dream, right?
|