Re: [Xweb-developers] Re: Reactivating development

[murphee (W. Schuster) <wer...@ne...>]

Peter Becker wrote:
> Hendrik Lipka wrote:
> The point I want to make is that Ant is a developers tool and that the 
> XWeb integration needed in this context seems to be only the XWeb task 
> for Ant. The frontend I imagine would be more for someone setting up a 
> small website without many IT skills -- I suspect Webbuilder has a 
> different target audience,

Not really; it was actually designed to be customizable for all kinds
of target audiences;
The idea behind using Ant was not so much to appeal to developers,
but to have a build process that is as open as possible;
Don't think of Ant (in Webbuilder) as the developers tool Ant, but as...
well call it an "API" for a build process; this makes it easy for
Plugins or DocumentTypes to add their own tasks to the build process;
they have the wide variety of Ant tasks at their disposal; another
advantage is to allow advanced users to modify the build process
themselves (by modifying the build file)... or to allow them
to fix the build file in case Webbuilder has messed it up;

In Webbuilder, the user actually doesn't see Ant itself (or does not
have to take notice of it); the user just hits deploy and the website
gets generated and uploaded;



 > also I think that audience is hard to target with a GUI.

Not necessarily; one aspect of Webbuilder was to allow for DocumentTypes
to come with their own GUI; ie. the FAQ DocumentType came with the FAQ
XSLT Stylesheet (I think stol^H^H^H^Hcopied from XWeb) and a simple
GUI that allows for easily entering and modifying the FAQ list;
the point is, that the FAQs are stored in an XML file; even with a
good editor (== vi) you would have a lot of overhead writing the file
yourself; with the tool, you would not have to look at the XML file;

Or imagine a DocumentType "NewsList", where you enter the news item
in a GUI and hit "deploy"; the GUI would slap a timestamp on the news 
item, update your RSS file and then arrange for a Rebuild of the Website;


 > Just look at how many people still code Java with vi or
> Emacs ;-) I never used much in terms of IDEs for C++, but with Java and 
> Refactoring it is a bit different.

And don't forget JUnit integration... that's one of the best features
in Eclipse;


murphee
-- 
Werner Schuster (murphee)
Student of SoftwareEngineering and KnowledgeManagement
Maintainer of the OGO-JOGI Project @ http://ogo-jogi.sourceforge.net/