Re: [NOF-Contrib] SWT viewer

[Dan H. <dkh...@gm...>]

Hi Dave,

Thinking further, I've changed my mind: I think it might be best for you 
to press on with a simple SWT viewer, rather than resurrect my RCP 
viewer.  I say this because it's probably best for you to dive into NO 
(which as you say is all gonna be new to you) with a toolkit you're 
comfortable with, rather than have to learn a brand new one such as 
RCP.  The OSGi issue could also be a long detour, and I wouldn't want it 
to sap your enthusiasm!

Once you get an SWT viewer going, you might then be in a position to go 
round the loop and "do over" using RCP.

Some ideas to help you structure your work:

1. you might remember, I did put up some "user stories" for writing 
viewers; you might want to use them as a way of plan the order of 
implementation.  They are at 
http://danhaywood.com/resources/viewer-stories/.

2. At the highest level, our generic OOUIs render one of three things: 
an object, a collection of objects, or an action parameter.  In Wicket 
Objects these correspond to different page types.  In my old RCP viewer 
the action parameter was in an accordion view on the LHS, and I used an 
editor to display either objects or collection of objects.    You'll 
need to figure out what they will be in your viewer.

3.  can I strongly suggest that you use a chain of responsibility 
pattern to build up the GUI piece by piece.  Both Rob's DnD viewer and 
my Wicket Objects viewer do this.  Basically you have a registry of view 
factories, and ask each one to whether it can render the object, or the 
part of the object (a property, a collection, an action, an action 
parameter etc).  Doing it this way opens up the possibility of 
customizing the views for objects (eg a google maps mashup).

4. have an applib, a metamodel and a viewer child modules (like in 
Wicket Objects).  The idea of the applib is that it allows 
viewer-specific annotations to be defined.  The metamodel module is then 
used to provide facet factories so that Naked Objects can pick up these 
annotations to expose in the NO metamodel for your viewer.  The viewer 
is where the bulk of the work goes.  Initially both applib and metamodel 
can be empty, but you'll probably think of a few little cute things 
you'd like to add eventually.  (I just added a @WizardPageDescription 
annotation in Wicket Objects, for example).

Cheers
Dan