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[dali-dev] Dali feedback from the WTP-PMC
I wanted to forward some of the feedback we have received from the WTP PMC members.  This feedback will be very helpful in prioritizing work post 0.5, and we may be able to do some minor work to address some of these items for 0.5, especially in the docs area.

I'll be responding to the questions below, but I wanted to get the general feedback out to the team.

Neil

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I worked through a start-from-RDB case and had some questions/comments, which I included with my more general questions below.

 

  • I think the Glassfish link is wrong; I had to use:
  • I couldn’t figure out how to set the persistence provider, or even what the types of the values were supposed to be for the two text boxes. Some kind of hint as to what’s being looked for (directory? jar file? URL? other?) would be helpful right in the dialog. Better yet would be some kind of validation/browsing help. Also, could we set a default so I wouldn’t have to answer the question from scratch the next time?
  • Would it be possible to include a step-by-step example that includes setting up Derby or some other O/S DB? If there are issues with being inclusive of vendors, then I’m happy to have lots of such examples…my concern is just that struggling to get to the starting point of the Dali demo took me a long time and a lot of setup steps/patience.
  • What’s the experience inside WTP? Would we use facets to make this simpler? How else does it differ from the SE (containerless) case?
  • How much annotation validation exists today? How hard will the migration to APT be? When will that happen?
  • Build path configuration in “Add persistence” wizard: Shouldn’t this be a checkbox, on by default, and then perhaps a button to get to the more complex setup dialog? Better yet would be offering to add the libraries automatically…I had to grovel around a little too much to get the libraries set up, and that felt automatable.
  • Heuristic mapping guesses (substrings, nearest match, etc.)? Any thoughts on a visual surface for this process? (just curious…obviously not part of this release ;-)
  • How hard will DTP migration be in 3.2?
  • How much functionality is covered by your tests? (Same question I had for JSF.)
  • User docs look pretty good – need some sections completed, links filled in, and minor proofreading. I noticed that sections 6.1 and 6.3 seem to be the same thing. Only major comment is to echo the “getting to the starting point was a real challenge” issue, and some step-by-step instructions for various DB providers would have been incredibly helpful. (I used Derby, but it could have been anything that didn’t require $ to download for experimentation.)
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First of all, great work and very good documentation and here are my initial comments - I will send more as I use them.

- I will repeat Arthur comments that DALI should be a facet that can be added to Java utility, web projects, etc.  This will simplify the process of adding/removing JPA to project, managing jars that are added, and consolidate the wizards with project wizards based on selection of a DALI facet.

- From the usability point of view I also did not know what to type for the persistence provider name.  Was under the impression that I type something that indicated toplink, hibernate etc.

- Similar to server runtimes, database runtime, webservice runtime (axis) , it would be very useful to have a "runtime" concepts that represents a JPA provider, this way the process of defining the jars, and other specifics can be encapsulated and reduced to a selection in a wizard.

- I had couple of exceptions modal exception dialogs popup when I created the first entity, but did not know that they were related to the error in the problems view  (typed the schema name wrong).  I will open a bugzilla fo it.

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+1 to the JPA runtimes comments. I also thought that these should be
registered at the workspace level like server runtimes and then
referenced from the facet on a per project basis.

Note the general pattern here: whenever there are multiple
implementation choices like servers, databases, JSF runtimes, JPA
runtimes, Web service runtimes, etc. these should be registered at the
workspace level via a Preference page and then referenced at the
project level via a facet. This is not how the Web service or server
tools currently work, but I think they should. This will unify they
way users configure projects. I think we should make this a theme for
WTP 2.0, i.e. to unify the user experience. Comments?


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