[news.eclipse.platform] Re: [Databinding, General UI] UI brainstorming,

[Tom Schindl <tom.schindl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas schrieb:
> Modeling UIs is as i found out a topic thats not really new. I have my
> concerns whenever people try to overabstract ui's in terms of (Form a
> and form b are all the same) so I think the modeling widgets approach is
> the way to go. I haven't thought this really through, but what I had in
> mid  tonight was another thought of abstraction. I think that we have

Yes I agree here with you. Though I still believe we should not
model/describe the direct implementation (SWT, ...) 1:1 which XSWT, XWT
do but stay at a level similar to what JFace is nowadays in Eclipse land
and one can easily transform JFace ideas like viewers, actions, ... .

Whether some is afterwards adding one more layer of abstraction above it
and do an m2m-transformation is some thing people can do afterwards.

An example might make this clear. I don't want to model a MenuItem but
the higherlevel of an Action which widget is used to represent this
action in the UI can be an MenuItem, RibonItem, ToolBarItem, ... .

Porting JFace concepts to other technologies is easily possible at
Nebula we have Viewers for Grid and Gallery or for example in UFaceKit
we did this with JFace-Viewers where we ported the concept to Swing and QT.

> different aspects in of widgets, they have a semantic, the have state,
> the have appearance (which may depend on state). I think we need some
> kind of expressions in the model (correct me if not) be it xpath or el
> or any kind of scripting. for the binding approach i like the idea of

Not sure what you mean with expressions in model?

> convention over configuration. for eg. i currently prototype a fully
> editable table abstraction that binds to my model and knows mostly
> everything about how to edit properties.

Yes I also did this for a customer (setting up a table with editing,
sorting, auto-filtering is done in 10 lines of code) but I'm not sure
this is a good idea for a framework. Whenever a framework forces people
into some programming style they get scared and don't use it and beside
this it may no allow me to fully exploit the possibilities of the
technologies.

> 
> what distracts me overall is that we have so many ui frameworks out
> there that somehow all do the same. do you believe that I'm too far from
> reality when I insist that a breakthrough would be if we had an
> abstraction layer that describes ui on a semantic level in a common way ?
> 

Sure but before we can do that we need to define what the UI is we want
to describe. Is it a SWT, JFace, ... what do we describe. Maybe a
mock-up example can clarify what you think about.

Tom

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Tom Schindl                                          JFace-Committer
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