[aerogear-dev] Aerogear Forge Plugin
Richard Kennard
richard at kennardconsulting.com
Tue Feb 26 04:06:17 EST 2013
Hi Vineet,
Thanks for your detailed response.
I'm not opposed to the idea of a FreemarkerWidget (or VelocityWidget, or StringTemplateWidget). Indeed, the early versions of Metawidget looked much like
you describe: a separate, pluggable inspection layer, then a Metawidget to render it.
However, we subsequently got a lot of feedback and did many interviews, adoption studies and case studies. This ultimately led to the architecture of
pluggable WidgetBuilders, WidgetProcessors and Layouts. Let me give you 3 examples of the feedback we got:
1. Widget choice needs to be orthogonal to layout. If you look at your 'master.html.ftl' and 'detail.html.ftl' you have a lot of duplicated code between
them. Both templates contain <#if... #else to choose between a 'select' box and a 'text' box. This code is going to inflate rapidly once you add your date
pickers, telephone numbers, URLs etc. to the mix. Worse, such code will need to be duplicated across both templates.
2. Equally, layout needs to be orthogonal to the wider page. Say I decide I want to use tables with rows and columns, instead of a div-based layout. Or say
I want to use different CSS classes to your 'control-group' and 'controls'. I will have to do it in both templates. But what is *actually* different about
the templates is the choice of search buttons/results versus save/cancel buttons. So the 'middle bit' of each page needs to be orthogonal. This will get
worse as you add more templates, such as separate 'search', 'view' and 'edit' templates (see the JSF scaffold).
3. Developers like to use third-party widget libraries, and also in-house custom widget libraries. If I want to add RichFaces, or PrimeFaces, or a mixture
of both, I want to be able to do so in a way that is orthogonal to all of the above
So my concern would be that a FreemarkerWidget would tightly couple widget choice (WidgetBuilders) and layout, and not allow widget processing (which is
important for other reasons I haven't touched upon). Freemarker does, I agree, offer an attractive level of immedicay and ease-of-editing templates. But I
wonder what your thoughts are on how it scales for some of the points above?
Regards,
Richard.
> On 22 February 2013 13:56, Vineet Reynolds Pereira <vpereira at redhat.com <mailto:vpereira at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> I'm glad you brought this up, since we've been looking to provide feedback once we've finalized on our usage of the Metawidget APIs. By the way,
> I'm the one responsible for the use (or abuse) of Metawidget in this manner.
>
> The rationale behind the use of Metawidget inspectors alone, is mostly because we want to allow users to modify the generated scaffold. One of the
> examples thrown around was to enable users to generate master-detail views instead of the plain CRUD forms generated by Forge. Another driving factor
> was the need to create or enable creation of scaffold generators for several JS frameworks including but not restricted to AngularJS, Backbone.js,
> Aerogear etc. Furthermore, there is also a possibility of users needing to bring in plugins and extensions to these frameworks, like Angular-UI or
> Backbone.Forms, since the base frameworks may not satisfy all needs. From my understanding of the Metawidget pipeline and it's use in the Forge Faces
> and (the earlier) Aerogear scaffold plugins, this would have been possible if a metawidget were created for every use case (one per framework, per
> widget-type). We attempted to bring in the use of templates written in a familiar templating langu!
> age (like Freemarker/Velocity/StringTemplate) into the scaffold generation phase to make it easier for users to modify the generated scaffold. This
> is somewhat on the lines of what the Yeoman generators do.
>
> Thanks to the APIs you've made available for the Metawidget pipeline, the inspection results could be processed before feeding them to the
> templates. Every scaffold plugin that could potentially be written, would more or less use this approach, with the sole difference being in the
> contents of the templates themselves. I hope this explains why I used the Inspectors alone, and not the InspectionResultProcessors and the rest of
> the pipeline. The inspectors just fit in naturally into the Forge scaffold generation pipeline.
>
> Based on the above, I personally think that a FreemarkerWidget (or VelocityWidget, or StringTemplateWidget) would be something to investigate.
> This is of course a raw idea of mine, and I would like to see if it is possible to use such a metawidget in a type-safe manner with the ability to
> configure the templates that it would consume. I'm not sure if creating such a widget would deviate from the intention behind the Metawidget project.
>
> As a side note, I'd also like to point out that there has been interest in supporting various additional HTML5 form input types (telephone
> numbers, URLs etc.) in the generated scaffold, and this would require extending the JPA/Bean Validation Inspectors in Metawidget.
>
> Best regards,
> Vineet
>
> PS: CC'ing the forge-dev list.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Richard Kennard" <richard at kennardconsulting.com <mailto:richard at kennardconsulting.com>>
> > To: aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org <mailto:aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org>
> > Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 5:17:29 AM
> > Subject: Re: [aerogear-dev] Aerogear Forge Plugin
> >
> > Seb,
> >
> > This looks very cool. I see you have used parts of Metawidget for
> > some of the implementation? I'd love to hear your thoughts on how it
> > went and/or any
> > changes you'd like me to make to Metawidget. For example:
> >
> > 1. You have some code in Html5Scaffold that processes the inspection
> > result returned by CompositeInspector. It does things like
> > 'Canonicalize all numerical
> > types in Java to "number" for HTML5 form input type support' and
> > 'Extract simple type name of the relationship types'. Was there a
> > reason you didn't factor
> > this into a Metawidget InspectionResultProcessor
> > (http://metawidget.org/doc/reference/en/html/ch02s03.html)?
> > Specifically BaseInspectionResultProcessor has
> > some methods to help?
> >
> > 2. You appear to be using FreeMarker templates rather than
> > Metawidget's WidgetBuilders, WidgetProcessors and Layouts (see the
> > existing Forge JSF scaffold,
> > Forge GWT scaffold, and Forge Spring scaffold). Could I ask what the
> > reasons were behind this?
> >
> > 3. I have recently implemented a pure client-side, pure run-time,
> > AngularJS version of Metawidget. If you were interested in a
> > non-static version of your
> > scaffold, perhaps you could give it a try?
> > http://blog.kennardconsulting.com/2013/01/metawidget-meets-jquery-ui-and-angularjs.html
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Richard.
> >
> > On 20/02/2013 11:49 PM, Jay Balunas wrote:
> > > Wow!!! Really awesome work guys!!!
> > >
> > > On Feb 15, 2013, at 11:15 AM, Sebastien Blanc wrote:
> > >
> > >> Hi all !
> > >> I'm pleased to announce that the first version of the Aerogear
> > >> Scaffold Plugin for forge is available !
> > >> It's still an alpha but thanks to the excellent work and help from
> > >> Vineet we have a working plugin :
> > >>
> > >> - CRUD Scaffolding based on your entities.
> > >> - One-to-one , many-to-one relation supported.
> > >> - AngularJS and bootstrap responsive based.
> > >> - Aerogear Pipe and Store used.
> > >>
> > >> There is still a lot to do but you can already play with it, a
> > >> quickstart is available here and you should be able to create
> > >> your first Aerogear App in
> > >> 5 minutes ;) https://gist.github.com/sebastienblanc/4961324
> > >>
> > >> An example of a generated application can also be found here :
> > >> https://github.com/sebastienblanc/scaffoldtester , please review
> > >> the generated code (at
> > >> least the JS and HTML) and report it to me and I will update the
> > >> templates accordingly.
> > >>
> > >> Next steps are :
> > >> - Integrate Search feature (using the DataStore filter facilities)
> > >> - Integrate Aerogear Pagination (although generic pagination is
> > >> present now)
> > >> - Integrate jQueryMobile (will probably be another plugin)
> > >>
> > >> Enjoy !
> > >>
> > >> Seb
> > >>
> > >> _______________________________________________
> > >> aerogear-dev mailing list
> > >> aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org <mailto:aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org> <mailto:aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org <mailto:aerogear-dev at lists.jboss.org>>
> > >> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev
> > >
> > >
> > >
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