On 6/23/07, Ryan Wynn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have been thinking about the best way to go about building a wysiwyg eclipse editor for jsf views. The only ones I have seen so far create jsps.
I can throw in a couple of thoughts based on our (Sun's) experience with WYSIWIG editing for JSF views in Java Studio Creator and Visual Web Pack. * The design surface we used started life (many years ago) as a very hacked version of the Swing HTML 3.2 widget, and nowadays looks nothing at all like that code. * The hard part about rendering JSF components isn't really the widget itself ... it's the fact that any reasonable JSF component is also going to assume that CSS can be used. Emulating all of *that* is not an easy task, no matter how you approach it. (We do a fairly large percentage of CSS 2, but there's tons of edge cases -- to say nothing of the fact that you need to decide which browser's incompatible behavior you should emulate for lots of these settings.) * To say nothing of the fact that, besides support for CSS, your typical JSF component today is probably also going to assume that JavaScript and DHTML are also available, so you can build user interfaces for Ajax enabled applications. * Creating Swing components that take CSS, DHTML, and JavaScript into account is, I suppose, technically feasible ... but by then you've written a pretty large portion of a web browser :-). * Expecting JSF component authors to write Swing component analogs for all their components doesn't seem like something the market would accept very well. Craig
There are already existing GUI builders for Swing and SWT. Would it be possible for Clay to handle a view id which is the class name of a Swing or SWT Panel? I suppose it would just need to build a JSF tree based on the Swing/SWT tree. Any thoughts on an approach like this? Ryan
