RE: [Xpipe-developers] XPipe GUI

[<de...@ei...>]

Hi Sean,

 
> Great stuff. I'm looking forward to looking at this. 
> (Downloading netbeans...)

Argghh. I've had to use netbeans for the last 2 weeks on a project in
work. Be very careful about using it in conjunction with another editor.
I haven't done that much digging, but it seems keeps info about auto
generated code in an XML file (.Form) and if the XML and the java files
get out of sync, or you overwrite the auto generated areas in another
editor (netBeans locks these off; you can't simply edit them with it),
netbeans may get very confused. It seems to break the once and only once
principle with the XML and Java; you'll need both in cvs. Though I'm
sure these irks can be made go away with enough configuring (BEA use
netBeans as the heart of their Portal4 product). It's also quite
demanding on memory and cpu; it's written in Swing after all ;)

What's good about netbeans: 1) _great_ for gui RAD work (less so for
fine tweaking); 2) ultimately configurable (you've got the source after
all); 3) plays really well with cvs (the diff tool is great; I'm
thinking about how to get winCVS to use it); 4) uses Ant to build the
Java 5) if you _don't_ keep the app logic out of auto generated code
you'll go insane, so you'll have to think model-view-controller as a
matter of survival.


> I was thinking of using UML sequence or state diagrams in 
> something like ArgoUML for XPipe editing. ArgoUML can save 
> out XMI which could be processed (with XPipe of course) to 
> create XPipe compliant pipelines.

ArgoUML is cool, you might want to check how clean the XMI output is. I
haven't used Eclipse. The thing about trying to build data driven Swing
apps (i.e. where they're fronting for a server or a DB and sucking in
XML config data) is you wind having to use reflection to do what would
simple enough in other languages; tho' XML serialization in jdk1.4
should help here. David Flanagan's Java Examples in a Nutshell has a
nice example of how to use reflection to drive Swing apps (it doesn't
use XML, but you can see how it might be done). 

Regards,
Bill de hOra