Re: [e4-dev] e4 Eclipse Application Services wiki page redux

[John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for kicking off the discussion
Susan. You've touched on a subject that's obviously near and dear to me,
so I've added some comments to the "critique" section with some
rambling thoughts. I don't have any good solutions at the moment, but there
are some clear problem areas in the 3.x API that we have an opportunity
to improve/simplify. I'll keep thinking about it and try to add more samples
of possible e4 code snippets to the page.

http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/EAS/Progress_Service#Critique

Meta-note: on wiki pages where we end
up with comments from various people it would be useful for people to "sign"
their comments, so people know who to argue with <g>. I've done this
with my comments on that page (there's an "add my signature"
button in the wiki editor that makes this easy to do).

John

Susan Franklin McCourt <susan_franklin@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent by: e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx

10/29/2009 07:00 PM

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Subject	Re: [e4-dev] e4 Eclipse Application Services wiki page redux

Hi, all...

After spending the morning refactoring some of my 3.x code to deal with
wizard modal contexts vs. jobs, wrapped progress monitors, and specialized
status handling, I got inspired to brainstorm on what I wish those services
looked like in e4. [1]

One thing that struck me when writing client code examples is that the
3.x client code can be simple when you work within the (narrow?) expected
usage pattern, but once you move away from that, your code explodes in
complexity. So I've tried to add multiple examples of client code to make
this point. 

I also think there are cases where usability suffers (poor progress feedback,
for example) because we can't use the code the way we want to, and there's
no way to hook in and fix the problem without copying code or abandoning
the standard service altogether. I'm not sure how we can quantify the usability
gains on these pages. ie, the code is no simpler than in 3.x, but it's
no worse, and it supports cases that couldn't be done before. I've used
a lot of words to describe these issues, maybe someone has a better presentation?

I also started writing some samples of what things might look like in an
e4 world, but I don't claim to really know and am hoping that my ideas
will spark further evolution.

susan

[1]
http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/EAS/Progress_Service
http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/EAS/Status_Handling
http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/EAS/Status_Reporting_______________________________________________
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