[e4-dev] Re: Some comments on XWT

[yves.yang@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Hi Ralf,

I'm glad you have tried out XWT. Thanks for your feedback. I think it
should be an open issue. So I cc e4-dev.

Please see my comment below:
>
> first of all, congratulations to the first e4 milestone! We played with
> it a bit and got a simple e4 demo application running on RAP :-) I also
> tried the new declarative UI stuff and built some simple UIs with XWT.
> It looks great! So it seems that XWT is now going to be the chosen
> technology for declarative SWT UIs, right? Unfortunately, I lost track
> of this topic a bit. But I'm happy to see that the syntax is simple and
> straight forward.
>
> I'm wondering right now whether there could be potential conflicts
> between element and attribute names used in XWT and in our CSS flavor.
> I think that even though the CSS is not directly applied to the XWT, it's
> a good idea to keep the naming in sync in order to avoid confusion and
> to leave the door open.

You are right, we have not yet worked on the integration between XWT and
CSS. I have created a bug:
   https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=264825

>
> One thing I noticed is that the content of the style attribute mimics
> the way of or-ing style flags together in SWT code. If they were
> separated by spaces instead, then they could be directly referred to by
> CSS like this:
>
>   <Table x:style="BORDER MULTI" ...
>
>   Table[style=~BORDER] { ...
>
> This brings up the namespace topic again: do we really need namespaces?

In XWT, we do need nemspaces. They are used to indicate the package in Java.

> If yes, then we should probably support them in CSS too. I know Angelo,
> you want to have them anyway ;-), I'm still hesitating - I'd prefer to
> keep the CSS simple...
>
> Another thing that catched my attention: is there a reason for uppercase
> attributes like "HeaderVisible". Of course, there's no technical
> constraint but I think those uppercase attributes are rather uncommon in
> XML and calling it "headerVisible" would be a better match to XML *and*
> Java conventions.

XWT supports both cases: HeaderVisible and headerVisible.

yves
>
> Do you think this makes sense? Is there still room for discussion? And
> what do you think is the best platform for this?
>
> Best regards,
> Ralf
>
>