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E4/position papers/Yves YANG
Contents
Position Paper: Yves YANG
Nowadays, UI development in Eclipse is mainly direct programming mode: UI controls and event handling are directly created in Java. This solution presents several drawbacks:
- High technology pre-requisite as UI developer
- Difficult to separate UI appearance and business logic
- Poor reusability
- Limitation of the dynamic UI support
- Very hard to integrate with develop tools
The Declarative UI should be a foundation solution to resolve these problems. Some of them can be resolved directly, and some of them needs a tools built on top of this component such Visual Editor, modeling tool.
This component can be used by three kinds of developer:
- SWT Developer
- UI designer
- Model designer
SWT Developer
SWT Developer should have a deep knowledge of UI technology such as SWT/JFace, JFace databindng, PDE, etc. She/he needs a component-based framework to develop reusable UI Components for Domain UI Designer.
UI designer
UI Designer is a domain application developer. She/he focuses on building domain application using UI Components provided by SWT Developer. The knowledge on SWT/JFace is not necessary.
Model designer
Model Designer is a domain application developer using MDA tools. She/he needs a Template engine to generate UI from the business model.
Essential features
The following features are very critical for this framework:
- Extensibility - Dynamic mapping with UI technology library such as SWT/Jface
- Support of Data Binding
- Component approach to guarantee the reusability
- Support of the MDA