XSL Tools UI Preferences Review

XSL Tools Preferences UI Walkthrough Eclipse UI Best Practices Working Group 7/23/2008

Prep/Homework

The following should be reviewed prior to the call:

• Introduction to XSL - general introduction to XSL for those that may not know about it.
• XSLT Project (XSL Tools) project page covering the goals of the XSL Tools project.
• XSL Tools Preference Pages Power Point - this contains the screen shots for XSL Tools preference pages.
• Optionally installing the XSL Tools from the Eclipse Web Tools update site. Requires Eclipse 3.4 and Web Tools 3.0 (Ganymede should find everything required.)

Discussion Topics

There are several possible discussion topics:

• How to make the Processor, Output Properties, and Available Processor pages less Java specific so that other non-java related processors could be used (i.e. Microsoft XSL, LibXSLT, etc.)

• Design and useability of the preference pages, are their better designs and layouts.

• Overall look and feel, do these conform to best practices for eclipse ui guidelines.

Discussion Notes from Walkthrough

• Dave Carver and Doug Satchwell reviewed the Preference Pages that XSL Tools has.
  • Doug Satchwell discussed the design choices and decisions for the Features, Output Properties, and Installed Processors. As well as reviewing sections for Validation and Templates.
• During the discussion of Templates, Dave Carver mentioned that the current Platform design for Templates is assuming a single line short description for templates.
  • It was suggested that Hovers should be available to provide a detailed description of the remaining text.
  • The hovers however don't appear to work on all platforms. It works for Windows but not for Linux.
• David Williams asked if there was a standard way in which Project Validation preferences were handled?
  • It was assumed that most people follow what JDT does.

• During the discusions that followed, it was brought up that the current Launch Tabs for JRE and Classpath require bringing in all of JDT in order to use this functionality.
  • It was suggested that Launch configurations be brought up for UI discussion in the future, and that JDT representatives be available to hear the reasons for why the java runtime options may need to be separated for separate use. These options aren't specific to just JDT, but may be needed by other IDE for Jruby, Python, etc, that might not want to include all of JDT.

Conclusions/To-do's

• Dave Carver to open a bug request against Text for hover's on linux.
  • Bug 242031 - was opened, but won't be fixed, as the GTK Tree View doesn't support hovers.
• Dave Carver to open a bug request against Text to allow for possible display of multi line text descriptions and entry.
  • 2008-07-29 - DC - Haven't opened this bug request yet.
• Setup followup XSL Launch Configuration walk through.

Other thoughts

[This section added just to capture quick notes from the meeting, from others, that don't appear to be captured elsewhere ... they probably are, just not obvious, but to make sure not lost this is a good place to put them until it's confirmed they are captured elsewhere.]