Re: Bringing back the dev tools
Re: Bringing back the dev tools
- Subject: Re: Bringing back the dev tools
- From: Thomas <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:48:35 +1100
For me, drag-and-drop was very convenient and intuitive, but it is
only a symptom rather than the cause.
In the world of WO Builder, a WO component was document-centric, like
a word processor or a web editor. The main panel is the document, and
surrounding it are various useful tools. Because it is like a
document, when I notice that the component in the current window is
getting too complex, I can select a portion of the component (which is
easy because the main panel displays all nested components in a very
obvious and logical way), copy it, create a new document (component)
and paste the contents into the new document. Save, create an API,
click on the source button to move any necessary Java code from the
old to the new, save again, then delete the still-selected old block
from the old document and replace it with an instance of the new
component.
And all the time this is happening, the various document inspectors
are completely visible: the bindings inspector for the component you
have clicked on, the complete object hierarchy for the component/
context/session/application/whatever-- not just type-ahead text, but
completely explorable visually, with all the irrelevant crap hidden.
Binding drag and drop is just the icing on the cake, but it is the
natural extension to this document/component paradigm (I hate people
who use that word, but in this case it is appropriate). You also have
a palette of useful pre-baked components and fragments that you can
just drag onto your document.
This is a single-purpose, beautifully crafted tool. It doesn't do
programming-- but it knows what you need to know about your code. It
doesn't do object modelling-- but it knows all about your object model
and allows you to interact with it in the way that is important at the
time of working on components.
So no, for me it is not just drag-and-drop.
Regards
Thomas
On 24/02/2008, at 1:29 PM, Q wrote:
I am curious. Is it mainly drag and drop binding people miss or
something more?
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