Boris, you are right. We should deal this matter in constructive
way. It is true that TM addresses EMF developers who want to build the UI in
EMF way. XWT is more low level on top of the SWT/JFace. Following this
direction, I think TM solution should/could be built on top of XWT resource. We
just need to develop a XWTResource to handle the XWT serialization for EMF. Could
someone help us on this task. Hallvard what do you think?
Of course, TM is welcome in PMF project.
Best regards
Yves YANG
From:
e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Boris
Bokowski
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 10:31 PM
To: e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [e4-dev] TM and XWT
Hi Yves, Hallvard, and everybody else,
Thank you for the interesting discussion so far. :-)
A couple of comments:
1. We don't need to pick a "winner" or a "loser". It is
perfectly fine to develop technologies in parallel, in fact having some
competition as to who solves a problem best is probably good (for some time).
For any component in the e4 project, there are several possible exit strategies
(ignoring obvious ones like "stop working on it"): graduate by
merging it into the Eclipse SDK, graduate within the e4 project, or graduate by
moving to another host project. Just to give concrete examples for the last
option, Nebula would probably be a good host project for XWT, and perhaps PMF
would be a good host project for TM.
2. Fragmentation is not good, in the long term. If after careful consideration,
the differences between XWT and TM turn out to be minor, or just a matter of
personal taste, it would be preferable to make an attempt at merging the two.
Clients will be confused as to which one they should choose. I don't know the
technical details, but if both TM and XWT provide a 1:1 mapping to SWT widgets,
shouldn't it be possible to have a 1:1 mapping between TM's EMF model and XWT's
XML files? It looks like https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=260289
is a good starting point for investigating this.
3. Real clients are more important than theoretical advantages of one
technology over the other. Based on my limited knowledge on who uses which
framework, Wazaabi seems to be ahead of both TM and XWT at this point, but I'd
love to be proven wrong...
4. A few of the comments in this discussion came across as being protective of
your respective technology, and not as cooperative as I would like them to be.
Furthermore, both XWT and TM currently score pretty low on the "committer
diversity scale". It would be so much better if you could combine your
efforts and build something that is greater than what could be built by just
one of the parties involved.
5. Independent of this discussion and whether consensus can be achieved, I
agree with McQ that pluggability is a good thing. I wouldn't want to see
anything in the e4 Workbench code that makes it easier to use one declarative
UI toolkit over another. It should be equally easy to contribute views,
editors, dialogs, preference pages etc. whether they are written by hand, or
built using TM, XWT, Wazaabi, PMF, or other such frameworks.
Btw, there will be an e4 Symposium at Eclipse Summit Europe (Ludwigsburg,
Germany, October 27-29): http://www.eclipsecon.org/summiteurope2009/sessions/sessions?id=981
Hope to see you there!
Boris
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