| [ve-dev] Replacing The Source Editor and Source Model |
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I have read the Extend
VE to build a ULC GUI builder document and I am referring to Section
3 titled “Visual Editor Architectural Overview”. From the diagram shown on page 6 of the document, it appears
that loading of the VE model from the .java file and saving of the VE model to
the .java file is done with a software component or components. I am wondering
if this component or components is replaceable so as to allow me to create my
own version or extension of the Visual Editor that will persist not to .java
files, but my custom XML file format which is not editable directly from the
IDE such as Java source code is. Here is a background on why I want to something like this: I work for a software company who is primarily in business
with public safety (i.e. police). As part of my job, I design data entry
screens for which my company has coined the term “Masks”.
These masks are targeted to entry, querying, or modifying various police, FBI,
etc. databases. What makes these data entry screens special is that they
contain features such as online help, field level validation, and transaction
level validation. These masks have lived on old 80M12 terminals, various
versions of ASP pages for IE, and will probably be ported to a custom Java
Client application or maybe JSP and other web clients besides IE. As a result of our masks being deployed to a moving target,
we have developed our own XML format to persist the masks, and have created a
suite of Java Beans with various properties for use in IDE style Visual
Editors. Our Java beans extend Swing JFC components. For the panel
bean, we have created a Java Bean customizer that will take the memory model of
the panel beans and field beans and import and export them to our XML format.
We can also export the mask to .ASP pages for use in our client website. Before I had even heard of Eclipse, I was using NetBeans,
and so I looked at modifying or extending the forms module for that project,
but quickly realized it is a mess, and full mysterious code by the likes of
GandolfsPersistantManager, etc. I was however, successful at porting the
internal .xml format to the NetBeans .form format, and using NetBeans to import
our JavaBeans, and modify the masks with the IDE, and if we removed all of the
source code for the .java files, NetBeans wouldn’t even waste time
creating Java code. NetBeans has proven a fairly satisfactory tool for
working with our masks, but there are a few bugs with the system that have to
do with the synchronization between the NetBeans form module memory model and
the our Java Beans memory model. We have been able to work around the
bugs. I would still like to be able to create a customized Visual
Editing tool to work with my Java Beans that does not deal with source code,
but that is able to load and save to our XML specification. I really like
the Eclipse Platform and would like to develop this tool for it. Is the design of the Eclipse Visual Editor conducive to
non-source code related Visual Editing of Swing or SWT based Java Beans persisted
with a defined XML format? Level
II Inc. Phone
voice: (425) 454-3175
fax: (425) 464-9571 Email
address: rtriebwasser@xxxxxxxxxxxx |