Chris Holmes ha scritto:
> Apologies for not being all up on this thread, hopefully soon I'll find 
> some time to sit down and digest it all.  But I wanted to throw out a 
> thought on UI.
> 
> Instead of picking a full blown UI framework we could consider just 
> using a template language, like freemarker, to provide the UI through 
> restlet directly.  Instead of having a separate and parallel 
> architecture, component like wicket or mvc like struts/spring, where 
> we'll be replicating objects, we'd just have html templated output from 
> the rest api.  One of my biggest goals with ui switch over is to make it 
> so we write less code when we add new options.  If we are making rest a 
> first class priority (which I strongly think we should), then a UI is 
> basically the same makes a lot of sense.
> 
> I had been a bit hesitant on this, but a few things are starting to 
> convince me.  First, that's how most all the other languages do it - in 
> python everyone just uses a template language for the web tier.  You can 
> swap them in and out, there's just not so much the concept that you have 
> a full framework that handles all UI.  Second is I talked to one of the 
> co-spec authors of JAX-RS who works on Jersey - 
> https://jersey.dev.java.net/  Think restlet but annotation driven 
> instead of coding routers.  He said that Hudson, our build tool, was 
> done in that way - rest style, and they used jelly for the template 
> language.  And it's UI looks pretty good.  We just need a designer to 
> come up with the UI, but we have a couple good ones at TOPP.

Yeah, that's one approach I considered as well... and ditched it out 
because of frustration after a few days.

First issue was that I could not find any kind of support for mixed 
freemarker/html scripting, you either get the first (in a lousy
way anyways) or the second.
Same goes for Jelly, no IDE support whatsoever.
Call me lame, but I've been programming with at least code
completion from the very beginning (VB6), I haven't wrote anything
without that kind of support for the last 10 years. Personally
I don't look forward to go back to a glorified notepad approach.

The second thing is that the frameworks provide you with components.
With just a template language, you end up re-doing everything from
scratch. Want a sortable, pageable table? Write your own.
Want a tree like ajax control? Same.

With wicket on the other side we'd have ready to use components,
the template would be pure html (which is very well supported
in any IDE I can think of), and we would not need to reinvent
the wheel, but just to use the ready made ones that the framework
provides. Of course, if you think of very simple pages, it
has overhead, I agree... but the moment we start adding
non trivial configuration, like complex type mapping or
community schema configuration, eh, I hardly see it done
without a Swing like support (that probably only component
based frameworks provide).

Cheers
Andrea


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