Hi Chris,
I don't think anything you said warrants starting a flame war :-) GUI
tools and text editors are not mutually exclusive. Where the Cayenne
philosophy may have played out is in the lack of interest in
documenting the XML format by the developers. But lack of interest
not equals opposing the idea. I am all for taking the DTD, and
creating a chapter in the user guide called "Cayenne XML Format" or
something and/or providing XML snippets next to the GUI screenshots
throughout the docs. If anybody is willing to participate in this
effort (even if they are not current committers), let us know - we
can arrange access to the documentation Wiki.
Thanks
Andrus
On Sep 26, 2007, at 2:57 AM, Chris Farnham wrote:
I've been using Cayenne on two different projects for a couple of
months
now and am very happy with it.
One thing that I don't like is the reliance upon a graphical composer
rather than a well documented and defined descriptor file. I know
that
the Cayenne community views the GUI tool as an important
differentiator
from other ORM frameworks. But not everyone likes to work with GUI
tools. Perhaps it's my Unix roots.
I prefer working directly with Cayenne's XML descriptor. I wish that
the schema was documented beyond just a DTD and snippets that people
pass around on this list. I also get frustrated when I find
documentation which explains how to control caching or custom queries
and all it has are step-by-step screenshots of the GUI tool.
I know that the GUI tool is part of the Cayenne philosophy and I am
wary
of starting a flame-war (perhaps this discussion was happened on this
list in times past and I haven't seen it).
Do other people feel the same way I do?
If so, can Cayenne better support both modes of use?
I would like to see documentation and examples that are XML descriptor
centric as well as GUI centric.
I also think that it'd be an interesting project to look at the
current
XML syntax and make it a little more user/text-editor friendly. I
have
no concrete ideas on this latter point but I've been playing around
with
DSLs in other areas and it might be neat to either streamline
Cayenne's
XML syntax or create a DSL. Either of these could be transformed into
the current XML syntax.
I only raise this issue because I've enjoyed using Cayenne and would
like to see it improve.
Thanks,
Chris Farnham
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