[eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] Modelled UI change notification - live model

[Kevin McGuire <Kevin_McGuire@xxxxxxxxxx>]

When showing the photo app demo in the
two talks I did, one question that came up was (an obvious one), "Why
do you need to keep restarting the RCP app after every model change?".
 

I don't think we've discussed this aspect,
but I assume that we eventually want to get to the point where model changes
can be realized against the live app. This matches the web DOM approach
where the way I change what is on screen is via DOM element creation/deletion.
 My understanding is that EMF can provide the change notification,
its a matter of us listening and doing the appropriate element deletion
and running the factories on the new nodes.  

Btw, a super cool demo would be to modify
the structure of the live app via _javascript_, which you hacked live.

Some questions:

1) Do we agree this is the behaviour
we want?

2) When do we we think we'd provide
it?

3) I think I can imagine with the current
code base how we handle on-the-fly creation and deletion, but what about
modification?  Right now the factories 'make', they don't 'modify
existing'. 

4) Do we need batching?  Does every
model change result immediately in on-screen changes?  I'm not sure
how the web handles this; it doesn't seem to require explicit batching
but the changes appear to come out as one change (might just be it all
happens so fast it looks like one change).

Because of the implications for (3),
I think we'd like to do this work sooner rather than later.  It would
also help to tell the story of why the modelled UI is more interesting
than just "I don't need this all in plugin.xml anymore".

Regards,
Kevin