Sounds great, I love these ideas! On Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 9:24 AM Andrus Adamchik <[email protected]> wrote:
> So I feel like the advent of agentic coding opens up new possibilities for > CayenneModeler. While some want you to think you can simply prompt Claude > to "Rewrite CayenneModeler in JavaFX" (or Electron or JetBrains Compose > Multiplatform), still with our limited resources, building and supporting > an entirely new thing is realistically out of reach. > > But I think we can take the current Swing app to a new level by augmenting > our rusty Swing skills with AI. A few of my experiments adding this or that > UI piece were mostly successful. A few idea on top of my mind: > > 1. A built-in MCP server for DB Import and CGen. This is to close the loop > on agentic coding, allowing to use both of these tools from an agent CLI. > (The MCP idea was what prompted me to look into this to begin with) > 2. Fix table editors UX (selections conflicting with cell editors) > 3. Write unit tests > 4. Modernizing L&F. Not sure how far we can get while staying in Swing, > but worth a try. Looking at FlatLaf lib, which is a successor of JGoodies > that we already use > 5. Implement dozens of small usability features (such as showing currently > selected Obj|DbEntity in tab view headers, etc.) > > My first pass (about 70% done) was not anything visual, but rather > refactoring the existing messy code to rid it of various architectural > experiments accumulated over the years (such as auto-bindings) and unifying > the MVC structure to be as close as possible to vanilla Swing. Ironically, > Claude was not that helpful in this process. It was good old IDE > refactoring, manually going through hundreds of files chasing dead code and > inconsistencies. > > Anyways, just putting this on the radar. > > Andrus
