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Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 07:52:53 -0700
From: "Alan D. Cabrera" <list@toolazydogs.com>
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Subject: Re: So I'm working on...
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On 6/28/2005 10:04 PM, Aaron Mulder wrote:

>	It seems that we've been bitten to some degree by people who are 
>working on things without telling anyone.  I've heard of people working on 
>the Gluecode management console (in case it is contributed to Apache 
>and/or Geronimo), and someone recently posted a Jira issue (I think) 
>saying that they've put toegther a prototype directory-scanning hot 
>deployer.  Dain worked on a revised kernel off on his own for a while.  
>I'm guilty of this to at least some degree too.  Who knows how many other 
>people are hard at work out there.
>
>	So I'm starting this thread to talk about what I've been working 
>out "on the side".  I hope that anyone else with a pet project will step 
>forward.  It seems that it would be better for all of us if there was more 
>discussion before things came to the "donation" or "integration" phase.  
>It's a lot easier to make any necessary adjustments (or secure assistance) 
>in the conceptual phase than in the "pile of contributed code" phase.
>
>	Anyway, I've been fooling with a JSR-88 configuration tool.  It 
>includes DDBeans, and a facility for dynamically generating a UI to edit 
>the DDBeans and DConfigBeans -- in other words, the J2EE deployment 
>descriptors and server-specific deployment plans.
>
>	One of the reasons it's still "private" is that I'm not all that
>confident of the approach.  I've got an XML file that describes the GUI,
>and then some code that builds a Swing GUI from that descriptor.  It's
>built in such a way that you could build a web (or CLI) GUI off the same
>descriptor, and it has plumbing for generating dynamic UIs for the
>DConfigBeans.  It seems like a clever approach, but I'm not sure there's
>really a need to support multiple UIs, and I'm also not sure the world
>needs another XML format for describing GUIs.  (I did go to a JavaOne 
>session on this today, but it only covered formats that are tied to Swing 
>only, with XML tags for individual swing widgets, which is not what I'm 
>looking for.)
>
>	Also, at the end of the day, I think the tool should have a fixed 
>editor GUI for each J2EE descriptor, and only be dynamic for the 
>DConfigBeans.  Being fully dynamic is not really as usable, it seems.
>
>	On the other hand, the tool is useful right now to verify that
>DConfigBeans are working right.
>
>	If other people are interested in looking at / working on / using
>this tool, I'll go ahead and check it in.  I'd certainly appreciate help
>and input.  It would be fantastic if someone would work on the Web or
>command-line UI generation part of it, so it would have more than one
>working UI output.
>  
>
This would have been better placed on a wiki, imo.


Regards,
Alan