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

[Paul Webster <pwebster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Kaiping et al,

I just had a few comments.  e4 is now moving into its first milestone,
which will contain mostly the languages (JavaScript support/debugging)
plus any changes released to the other projects.  Not a lot of changes
yet, and the main model re-work will go in early to M2 (i.e. next
week).  I expect the other changes to accelerate from there.  The
community will need to decide in M2 and M3 what is important for it to
have in e4 1.0 and contribute or work with contributors to make that
happen.

It would seem to me that the appropriate serialization format for form
based UI would be the XForms [1] standard.  It's definitely XML, and
as you mentioned can be interpreted by humans, C/C++, Java, others.
It makes perfect sense (and was the intent of  XForms) to create
XForms and then transform them (Model to Model, as it were) to the
appropriate renderer (PDF, DHTML, a UI text file).  It can be
transformed into XWT or TM, and transforming it would never be the
responsibility of the application developers.  If your domain is UI
forms, then using a Domain Specific Language seems appropriate.

That being said, e4 is interested in promoting declarative UI.  In M2
I would like to see both TM and XWT [2], [3] added to one or more of
the demo applications (contacts and e4photo) and possibly new demo
applications created.  The declarative UI needs to be able to be
hosted in the e4 modelled workbench and support the standard eclipse
methods for extensibility (if they accept client contributions).


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=279047
[3] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=281535

-- 
Paul Webster
Hi floor.  Make me a sammich! - GIR