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Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4 probably too late?
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Andrey,
I'm impressed that you've clearly given all this a great deal more thought
than was my impression from your somewhat depressing first post. The
technologies you've highlighted do indeed seem cool, and buzz about cool
new things is not a negative thing in and of itself. Michael Scharf was
right to point out that my Teflon Programming bash was a little too narrow
sighted. On the one hand, it's important to temper buzz with calm
thoughts that focus on building lasting value. On the other hand, it's
clearly stupid to ignore innovations. So while I've not felt compelled to
rotate my buttons or turn them on their side, I can imagine the
sophistication of technology capable of doing such things being put to good
use. It's clear there is a paradigm shift taking place as the ability to
render massively complex UIs becomes feasible with the advent of improved
processing power and memory capacity. So it's clearly important to
consider how to exploit this and incorporate it into our thinking for the
future...
One of the things for which I see great promise is to bring modeling into
this space at all levels so that we can orchestrate the growing complexity
at a higher level of abstraction than we do today. I think this is a space
in which Eclipse can shine, and can leapfrog the others who have a narrower
focus. Indeed the devil is in the details, so the ones who get all the
details right will be the winners. I suspect we have by far the most
diverse community of free thinkers looking into this space.
One aspect that I like to remind people is the following. If you have 1000
simple things, despite the fact that each is individually simple, if there
is nothing that brings a unifying overview to those 1000 things, i.e,. some
mechanism to reason about then and work with them in a relatively uniform
way, you will still manifest an unmanageable complexity contrary to the
apparent simplicity of each part. This is the fallacy of a focus that
looks for simplicity in the small...
Ed Merks/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA
mailto: merks@xxxxxxxxxx
905-413-3265 (t/l 313)
Andrey Platov
<andrey@xxxxxxxxx
> To
Sent by: E4 developer list
eclipse-incubator <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@eclipse.o
-e4-dev-bounces@e rg>
clipse.org cc
Subject
04/13/2008 07:31 Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4
AM probably too late?
Please respond to
E4 developer list
<eclipse-incubato
r-e4-dev@eclipse.
org>
Hi Ed,
As for Jim van Dam's approach, I'd agree - it is not only compelling, it's
natural aproach to UI development and similar to JavaFX/UI. The devil in
the details: how we will transform higher level UI abstractrions into final
representation. Atomic block in "old UI" composition is a widget. Atomic
block in JavaFX/WPF is a 2D graphics primitive. These technologies treat
Classical Widget as a composite of lower-level primitives, and these
primitives available on every platform (which is not true for Widget-based
approach) - just to support Jim van Dam's run everywhere point. This is not
conceptual shift, but
1) few years ago we were not able to develop such UIs due to CPU/GPU
performance limitations (and this was main reason why SWT was born).
2) now scaling down to lower-level primitives gives new very attractive
possibilities like: run everywhere (if something can provide adequate
CPU/GPU power and runtime), clean separation of UI represenation and UI
logic (we may expect designers working on desktop designs in near future
like we see in Web design market), flexible UI customization at run time
and at any level (in WPF I can override Button look-and-feel for example
adding rotate and scale transorm, adding few lines around caption, etc... I
can completely replace look-and-feel of my button at application or window
level - and all these will be vector graphics - just forget about pixels)!
This is also very attractive from UI components reusing and representation
inheritance standpoints, etc. Of course there are much more benefits we can
figure out...
So regarding buzz - I do not think this is a buzz, but natural evolution of
UI started with SVG and Flash; higher-level technologies like Flex; and
continued with JavaFX/WPF. It is constantly running evolution during past
years, and finally we have these technologies ready for end-users, and
end-users have PCs powerful enough to run such UIs. So there is a trend to
decomposite UI down to 2D (3D? :)) primitives. And such decomposition rules
shall be fully controled/defined by application, which is contrary to
original SWT idea and goal.
Sincerely,
Andrey
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ed Merks" <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: "E4 developer list" <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "eclipse-incubator-e4-dev" <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
eclipse-incubator-e4-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2008 8:23:05 AM GMT +06:00 Almaty, Novosibirsk
Subject: Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4 probably too late?
Andrey,
Are you sure "FX" isn't just the latest buzzword designed to appeal to the
Teflon Programmers of the world?
http://ed-merks.blogspot.com/2008/04/teflon-programming.html
It seems to me there's yet another cool way to build UIs approximately
every other week. I suppose we can only hope that eventually someone will
do something of lasting value, but what makes you believe this would be it?
Until then, I'll personally remain skeptical of anything that smacks of
hype and place my bets on technology that's focused on lasting value...
When it comes to innovative ideas, I found Jim van Dam's approach to
Intentional UI modeling to be quite compelling:
http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/index.php?page=sub/&id=56
But of course for me, everything is about modeling. The realization of
those models, along with the details about how to render them in the
shifting UI technology stack, seems subservient to the high level
abstractions that transcend these details...
Without something of lasting value, we'll all remain in the "rinse, lather,
repeat" loop for our entire careers...
Ed Merks/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA
mailto: merks@xxxxxxxxxx
905-413-3265 (t/l 313)
Andrey Platov
<andrey@xxxxxxxxx
> To
Sent by: eclipse-incubator-e4-dev
eclipse-incubator <eclipse-incubator-e4-dev@eclipse.o
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clipse.org cc
Subject
04/12/2008 07:41 [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] E4
PM probably too late?
Please respond to
E4 developer list
<eclipse-incubato
r-e4-dev@eclipse.
org>
Hi folks,
Few weeks passed after EclipseCon but I'm still under E4 impression. I saw
excited people around applauding demos of scripts, which changes caption
color. I saw full room of people excited with demo of the editor on the
web, and I believe many of them left EclipseCon feeling bright Eclipse
future. I have heard from E4 gang "we do not know details but it will be
cool", and I believe E4 will be cool. There was questions about 3.5,
diversity, and technical problems (like event handing), but to the best of
my knowledge no one asked E4 gang: "guys, why do you so happy? do not you
think E4 is very late?.. probably too late".
As for me - I left EclipseCon with dark thoughts about Eclipse future.
There are two names made me unhappy: WPF and JavaFX. Nevertheless I'm aware
of WPF and JavaFX exists I did not paid attention to them. After I looked I
was shocked. Both WPF and JavaFX very similay and both are definitely new
way to develop UIs. And SWT (as well as "classic" component based OS UIs)
is far away. I'm afraid many eclipse developers did not looked into WPF or
JavaFX deep. Personally I was thinking about them like declarative UI
languages and corresponding frameworks - nothing new comparing to
DHTML/Scripting for example. But I was totally wrong - they definitely
rethinked how UIs shall be build. After looking inside I started trust
Sun/MS marketing people and believe that any of these two technologies can
start new age for UI development.
For me eclipse is everything during past 5 years, my work, my hobby, my
hopes... I can find everything I need in eclipse world. If I can't find
anything I can develop it. After looked at JavaFX/WPF - I can't imaging
anything better, but I can't have such technologies in my eclipse-oriented
world. Most disappointing to my totally eclipsed mind that I can have them
now, but out of eclipse. In 2008 I can start programming with WPF/JavaFX
and provide UI designer with top-notch tooling. While E4 is just an
incubation community-driven project at warming up stage, well funded and
formed teams at Sun and Microsoft worked hard on new UI development
concepts for past *years*. They done, E4 did not started.
Folks, we talking about to run E4 on desktop OSes and web runtimes such as
Flash, they own that runtimes (Java and WPF/Silverlight); we talking about
new programming models for UI; they own new technologies introducing new
programming concepts for UI (JavaFX Script and WPF/XAML) and these
programming models doing a lot intersting things in terms of databinding,
event processing, UI composition, rendering, and performance optimizations
- E4 did not face that problems in practice yet. We predict to have
something (hope "something" will include great UI tooling) in 2010 - Sun
and Microsoft releasing tools for their technologies in 2008 (upcoming
JavaFX design tools, which will be interoperable with Adobe products, and
Microsoft Expression WPF tooling).
I did shared my concerns with a friend (who is an eclipse committer). I
told, hey I'm frustrating how eclipse is far from what I saw in WPF and
JavaFX. The answer was: It's OK - Eclipse is a conservative platform...
This is contrary to my understanding of Eclipse during past years - I was
thinking Eclipse is an innovative platform...
5 years ago SWT was a best choise for me: it was much rich compating to AWT
and much faster comparing to early Swing. Now SWT looks like dinosaur
comparing to WPF and JavaFX. Do you think it's possible to jump into this
running train?
Please can anyone comment of my concerns about SWT future (I mean basic UI
rendering layer for E4).
Will be there a switch to JavaFX? If not - do you think there can be enough
resources involved to catch JavaFX/WPF with alternative but comparable
technology (New SWT) and relevant tooling?
Kind Regards,
Andrey Platov
Eclipse DLTK Project Lead
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