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[news.eclipse.technology.lepido] Re: Interested in MDA Feature Details
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Sorry for the delay, vacation came in the way...
Christian Sy wrote:
Hello,
this project has a very high potential in my opinion. Cocoon is a very
interesting framework, but lacks good development tools. The
combination of both can boost productivity.
Yup. That's the main idea behind Lepido.
Especially the MDA feature which is mentioned in the roadmap, is
interesting for me. I am just designing a concept of a generic web
application, which automatically creates view/edit forms from data
model XML definitions.
My choice was to use Cocoon because of its flexible handling of XML
and rendering options, and its clear separation of logic and GUI
presentation, different to the ugly JSP approach.
My question is, how would your MDA approach look like in detail ? I
assume the user would create a data definition XML (which is more
database oriented), then appends GUI specific information (like in the
form definition files), and then the system automatically could create
view/edit forms.
Exactly.
One could use a general template for view forms, and one for edit forms.
In my opinion, best would be not to generate code/XML's at all, but
just let the user configure a set of preexisting templates which are
generic enough to handle the usual data entry fuctionality at runtime.
We then could deploy a generic web application (with basic
functionality, like sorting/filtering), which can be customized by the
user/developer for its concrete data model. This is my long-term
goal...Comments ?
I personally believe that no templates can be generic enough, and that
either they don't fill some of the needs, or become a complicated mess
to handle all of them (or at least hoping it).
An hybrid approach is required, that mixes generic templates for the
standard needs and allow enriching/extending generated code for
non-standard ones.
Sylvain
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://people.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director