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#BringBackOurViews! [message #1736695]

Fri, 01 July 2016 08:42

Boy D'Poy

Messages: 67
Registered: October 2011

Member

will we have the Scout Explorer and the Scout Object Properties views in the next service release, or should we leave you bitterly noted the drop of infatuation to Scout due to the removal of this awesome feature? Rolling Eyes

how do you justify abolition of so exciting tools?

I try to explain myself, but I fail Sad

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Re: #BringBackOurViews! [message #1736707 is a reply to message #1736695]

Fri, 01 July 2016 09:30

Matthias Zimmermann

Messages: 208
Registered: June 2015

Senior Member

hi boy d'poy

i fully understand your frustration and also share your concerns to a certain extend. let me try to motivate the current situation and possible future directions.

many years ago

15 years ago the (proprietary) scout framework allowed develpers to create business application based on a large xml configuration file. the only way that people could possibly handle something like this was a tree like develpment tool that helped scout developers to navigate through the configuration of the app in a meaningful way.

then, more and more of our employees came from schools that did teach them to write java code and these people sometimes got frustrated with working with xml configurations. they much rather would be programming in java.

as the ecilpse IDE became THE hot developer platform at the time two scout core developer changed the scout programming model from a configured approach to a programming based approach. to help smooth the transition from the xml configration to the new programming approach it seemed necessary to provide a scout perspective in the eclipse ide that offered a tree navigation similar to the previous development tool.

in the mean time, our scout developers increased in numbers from 80 to close to 200 scout developers. based on the observation of our developers over the last few years it became clear that the largest part of these people were working in the eclipse java perspective for most of the time.

the only reason to switch to the scout perspective was for creating new forms (with formdata, permission and service objects), new codes, new text and a few other things. as a result, we had the unlucky situation that a substantial amount of our tooling effort went into something that most of our employees were using only very rarely.

recent history
with this background we can now switch to the more recent history. the one that explains how we came about the switch to the neon release with the html5 renderer and the java platform.

this substantial move required quite some development efforts just to rebuild the scout runtime with a quality level that is sufficiently high for productive use (with our many scout projects, we cannot afford to do anything else). this means that the development of the associated tooling could only start towards late 2015 so all in all we roughly had a 5 month window for the neon tooling.

what we did put into the tooling so far were exactly those wizards that were most frequently used by our developers. we are fully aware that additional tooling will help the community and us to become more efficient while writing and maintaining scout applications. more tooling support will now come from release to release.

future
it is unlikely that we will come back to the scout perspective as in previous releases as we cannot afford to invest heavily into features that we do not use ourselves. most likely additional functionality will be built into the java perspective and we will probably see some scout related views (eg. for forms and form fields).

the best approach to help to guide the tooling development is by providing your input in the related sdk forum thread. when adding to this thread please let us know about your top priorities and reasons. please try to be as specific and clear as possible.

i hope that the above information helps you to understand the current situation and helps you to see how you can best contribute to the process.

thanks in advance for your feedback and input!

best regards
matthias

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