| Re: [platform-core-dev] What's a project |
> From: Kevin McGuire/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA
>
> Finally, I would like to point out that although we've grown used to
> it, the user experience right now around projects is terrible. Its
> brutal for new users that the first thing they must do before
> writing one line of java code is to create a structure for the sole
> purpose of pleasing the tooling. This is particularly bad for RCP
> apps. Imagine a photo organizing/authoring app (hey, like the e4
> demo! :>) whose first step is "make an album". Its artificial and
> shows our architecture leaking through. For that reason I liked
> what John was describing in terms of being able to manage these
> roots independently. I agree that forcing people to manage N of
> these is difficult, but there may be ways of streamlining the user
> experience. What I liked though was the notion that identifying the
> roots is the task ("tell me where you want to store your photos")
> vs. creation of a root ("create an album before you can get started").
>
Of course, we need to distinguish between unavoidable structure that the user *must* deal with, and underlying structure that we manifest as it becomes needed. The "ide" for the Processing[1] environment comes to mind, which is effectively Java under the covers, but which doesn't even require you to define a *method* (let alone a class, package, file, bundle, or project) before you start executing code.
McQ.
[1] http://processing.org/