Because I'm now the official grumpy customer standard, I think I'd
better pull up my socks and provide some user feedback.
A few months ago I offered to write a document that listed all the
tasks when working with WO components, and how you would do them in WO
Builder, WOLips Component Editor, and (just for completeness because I
used to do this a lot) in Golive. The grand plan was that this could
be a focus for communication between the user and developer
communities, helping the developers to understand how we actually use
the tools.
Unfortunately, in addition to my usual project work, I got involved in
a full-time on-site contract that has only just finished, and I have
not had time to do it. And Mike Schrag has made it even harder by
removing most of my "if only WOLips could do this" complaints.
Ironically, while on site with the recent contract (a large comms
system vendor, working on JSP and comms plumbing), I managed to
convince one of the R&D managers that WebObjects would be useful for
the entire organisation. The reason that it is ironic is that I was
demonstrating WO 5.3 on his laptop, using XCode. He told me later that
what blew him away and sold him on WO was WOBuilder, and how it
seamlessly and visually built on the output of EOModeler. His user
interface designers agreed. He was much less happy with WOLips and the
obsolescence of the Apple tools. But I assured him WOLips was growing
rapidly. In the end, the only way to make him completely happy was to
demonstrate using WO web services as the back end and Flex as the
front end. Once again everybody involved got really excited because
they could use a GUI visual editor to develop the user interface, and
the GUI designers could work pretty much independently of the
application developers.
There is a common theme here, and it is still the one thing I am
missing most from the WOLips Component Editor: the ability to see at a
glance the layout of the component and all its elements, to click on
an element to view all its bindings (defined or not) and edit these
bindings in a separate area. Flex Builder does this beautifully. WO
Builder does it well enough. Mike's latest outline view changes are
awesome, much better in some ways than WO Builder, but it still
doesn't give me the "what does it really look like" view.
Component Editor's Preview pane may do a lot of what I want (except
tables), but unfortunately almost every time I click the "Preview"
tab, Eclipse hangs on 100% CPU use.
Mike has already identified the lack of table display, and I believe
he knows all of this stuff already. But as a grumpy customer standard
it's my duty to express it. 8^)
Please note that I am NOT asking for a WebKit-rendered preview of what
the final page will look like. I use CSS heavily, many of my
components are used with many different CSS "skins," and I would
rather avoid that complication. However, I really miss tables. There
are times when no amount of outlining will help. For example, when
editing a table showing a list of products, one attribute per column,
with WOStrings for the header and rows, and trying to work out exactly
which <td> corresponds to the <th> that describes it. This is very
hard in any WOLips view, and trivially easy on WO Builder. Also
inserting rows (not too hard in WOLips) and columns (very hard in
WOLips) is trivially easy in WO Builder.
Now assuming I had tables in a preview mode that didn't hang Eclipse,
(not being narky, Mike, just telling how it is), there is still one
important thing missing: the ability to change the bindings while in
preview mode.
So here's my wish list:
- add a bindings inspector that shows all possible bindings of the
currently selected component, with auto-complete when typing values;
- make a combination of the preview and outline view that allows you
to select a component so you can view/edit its bindings
- add table support.
Now a local cultural reference: "Tell 'im 'e's dreamin'!" (extra
points for those who recognise the reference).
In my mind I had a long list of things to complain about, but that
darned Mike Schrag has chewed that list right up!
And as the official standard grumpy customer, I would like to complain
about how Mike has so thoroughly reduced my list of complaints.
Regards
Thomas
On 31/10/2007, at 11:51 PM, Mike Schrag wrote:
* WebObjects Builder is dead and gone. Component Editor replaces
it. This is the #1 point of contention, I believe, as Entity
Modeler is a fairly complete replacement for EOModeler. Component
Editor does not provide the equivalent of the quasi-preview mode
(the thing that can do the table editing with binding wiring). It
does provide, in recent builds, component previews that are very
similar (I think more useful, IMNSHO :) ) to WOB's, extensive
support for completion, and there is a new bindings editor coming
that is essentially based on the bindings inspector panel from WOB
(for people who don't want to think about it, the intent is that
this can replace the WOD Editor view). For what I'm doing, this is
the majority of my focus at the moment. Well, "easier-to-use" in
general has been my main focus for the past few weeks. I've been
really trying to go through the UI's and tighten things up (the new
Entity Modeler error dialog is a good example of this). I really
want to get the tools to a place where WOB people aren't totally
turned off. I don't know how far that will go at the moment.
Thomas has been my grumpy customer benchmark up until now, but he's
been unusually happy recently. As luck would have it, I think I
have found my new grumpy customer benchmark.
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