[jboss-as7-dev] Management Console Screens

[Heiko Braun]

On Mar 11, 2011, at 9:27 AM, Dimitris Andreadis wrote:

> I think the task oriented approach is good but what's missing from the current layout is 
> some form for visual clue of where you are within the management information tree that the 
> domain model imposes, or a way to use that to navigate quickly to the particular 
> Profile/Group/Host


Another thing that comes to my mind:

If you take an engineering point of view, i.e. you know the jboss_7_0.xsd, then you tend 
to think in terms of a tree structure. But one goal with taking the task oriented approach,
was to break with this mental model and offer an alternative, that's easier to consume.

That's the reason I tried to explain it differently in the blog post, by talking about a layered
configuration instead of a tree. The tree structure seems to be simple on a first glance, 
but it's not very good at explaining that configuration properties are inherited from other elements in the tree.
I.e. system properties across profile, groups and hosts. 

This inheritance (or layered structure) also implies a certain order:
I.e. you need to create a server group, before you can reference it in a server configuration.
Now I don't want to take this discussion to far, plus I might turn out to be wrong, but we should aim for a simple
mental model that works for most users. IMO layered works better then tree structured. But at the end one or the other need
to be reflected within the UI.

I guess this is the reason why I got away from using a tree on the left hand side.

Ike