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Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] Fw: Declarative UI roundup?
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Kevin,
You just made the argument for XSWT. :-)
Because XSWT adds 0 layers of abstraction between itself and Java, it's literally just a 1:1 mapping from a more convenient, less verbose notation.
-Dave Orme
On Nov 5, 2008 5:32 PM, "Kevin McGuire" <Kevin_McGuire@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Great discussion guys. I'm only
beginning to understand this area and the thread has been helpful. Actually
my hope for the roundup is exactly this kind of shared understanding of
the technology, and some common view of the goal.
> The UI model tries to abstract
> away the underlying technology by focusing on what information ...
Hallvard, I admit that I know nothing
of your research so I'm just going to speak quite generally, which may
not at all match what you're doing:
I find this theoretically cool but with
my practical hat on I'm trying to understand the benefit this added abstraction
buys us in Eclipse. My original thinking was that the declarative
language should map 1:1 to SWT, because its SWT that actually does, well,
the useful stuff. The buck stops there. Either you can have
list of strings, or a list of rendered strings plus images, or owner draw
... its in the capabilities of the widget and the only way to get stuff
on the screen. In fact one can regard SWT as this exact toolkit independent
model (if we think toolkit=platform) because it attempts to isolate you
from platform specifics, thus the SWT list widget is already that abstraction
of the concept of a list widget across all platforms. It just happens
to be API based, not declarative.
My concern is that inevitably when you
go to an abstraction, you inherently lose some fidelity. Maybe some
capability of a particular system you care about (in this case, SWT) can't
be expressed because your model is a common subset. Or, the model
is a superset, in which case you write in the hopes of something happening
which doesn't on your particular platform. We often see the former
case and sometimes the latter in SWT. Since I've already lost fidelity
in SWT vs. the platform, I'm hesitant at losing more through another abstraction.
Yves, I have a similar concern around
the use of XAML since I may lose fidelity in going to SWT, but that's perhaps
more a statement of my ignorance of XAML.
Thus my thinking was perhaps along the
lines Tom outlined: a declarative model written against SWT, exposing accurately
the capabilities of SWT but in a serializeable format instead of Java code,
providing a model which facilitates mapping to other declarative models.
So I question, why do I need yet another abstraction? I guess it
would let me go to Swing, which personally I'm not interested in. Maybe
it would allow me to go the web, but SWT is going to do what it always
does and treat it as a platform. Unless you believe there is an inherent
flaw in doing so which a common abstract model solves? I suppose
it could allow me to reuse parts of UIs (e.g. some pre-canned wizard pages),
but in my experience you always roll a UI that is specific to a problem
area. Finally, it allows me to escape a particular programming language,
(Java, yeah!) but I think I get that from the declarative aspect, not the
common abstraction. What am I missing here?
> The main problem with going through XML and a renderer, is that it only handles
> the creation p...
<naiveQuestion>Isn't this solved
to a great degree through the use of databinding?</naiveQuestion>
Regards,
Kevin
Tom and others,
Just a bit of background: My research field is model-based UI design and the
last...
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