AW: [e4-dev] Why XML UI is important for us

["Tom Seidel" <tom.seidel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm following very interested the discussion about UI on this list but I don't understand the difference in quality about the declaration language of a UI. To me it's absolutely irrelevant if I declare a label with

new Label(...

or with 

<label text="..."

That's syntactic sugar.

Your issues with developing UIs (Skill, Guideline,...) will not be resolved by switching to a xml declared UI, they will be just moved.

The fact that people are more familiar with XML than with EMF/SWT/whatever makes no sense, you also have to "learn" how to declare an UI in XML.
The problems in UI development is IMHO not the declaration syntax but the separation of UI and the business domain. From my experience (I'm working as architect also for insurance, authority,...) the best way to improve quality of UIs is an enforced architecture to separate UI declaration (regardless of which technology) and binding the UI to a domain model. But this is an issue in architecture, not in technology. If you separate these two things you will resolve most of your problems. Your lower skilled developers (whatever this means) can use GUI-Designer-Tools to create the UI satisfying the guidelines without knowing anything about the business-code. Then your application developers can bind the model to the designed ui (with APIs like Riena or Databinding).

Like I said, the challenges in UI development is not the UI itself, but the integration into an application and the binding to a domain model. Therefore Eclipse already provides very good frameworks and APIs. Take a look at Riena; its mission is (among other things) to provide a framework for building such applications.

The fact that EMF is IMHO a better choice for a declarative UI is diverse (many advantages were already mentioned). 
Take a look at the tools that are built upon EMF and compare them with tools for raw XML editing. I think everybody has already searched for a typo within a xml file. Creating new tools for EMF Models is also much simpler than for a xml block (which is also essential for e4-tooling).
The next thing is that XML serialization is just another feature of EMF. Everything you have declared in a XML file can be represented in an EMF Model, so the discussion itself makes no sense due to the fact that XML is a subset of EMF.
The assumption that XML is better for simple cases I cannot confirm from my experience, also with development-teams that have no EMF experience it makes no big difference.


Last but not least I still have a feedback for the current e4: Development with e4 is a great new experience. Great work :)

Best Regards,
Tom Seidel

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] Im Auftrag von kfang@xxxxxx
Gesendet: Freitag, 9. Oktober 2009 12:10
An: E4 Project developer mailing list
Betreff: Re: [e4-dev] Why XML UI is important for us


hal@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> In my experience with XSWT (similar to XWT) and the EMF-based TM, XML 
> is simple for simple cases, but very complex when the problem grows, 
> while EMF is slightly more complex for the simple cases, but scales 
> very well with increasing complexity.

In our insurance application developpment avec 1500 UI forms, we hava 90 % of simple case and 10 % of complex case in UI developement.

We perfer the simplicity of XWT than the EMF based approch because there isn't enough good skilled java developers in my team who can master EMF approch.

You have to know that the skill of programming of application developers is very limited. But, they know very well the fonctionality of the applications.

So, the simplicity is one "must" for us.

Kaiping FANG

Systems Architecture Manager
CCR
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