[jboss-user] [JBoss Tools (users)] - Feedback on the Smooks editor

mzeijen do-not-reply at jboss.com
Mon Mar 9 14:58:10 EDT 2009


The last couple of days I have been evaluating the Smooks Eclipse plugin in JBoss Tools RC2. You may have noticed that from the number of Jira issues I have raised for the plugin ;). I would like to share some of my feedback. My interest for the editor comes from the fact that I'm one of the core developers on Smooks, plus the fact that the company I work for uses Smooks and JBoss ESB extensively in a number of production environments.

I must say that I find it great that JBoss is developing the Eclipse tooling for Smooks. A good tool should make it a lot easier to use Smooks and should open Smooks up for a lot more people. Doing transformations within the ESB should also become a lot easier.

While using the editor I ran into quite a few issues while trying to do some quite basic things. There where a number of bugs that made the editor practically unusable. I understand that some of these bugs probably only appear in some environments and that there aren't a lot of people out there that are testing it. I added Jira bug reports for these issues. I hoped that the most critical ones would be fixed in the version that gets released with JBoss Tools 3.0.0 GA. Some of the bugs I've added have been fixed already, which is great, but the fix version is for the Smooks editor that gets released in JBoss Tools 3.1.0 GA. Does that mean that JBoss Tools 3.0.0.GA is going to be released with a very buggy Smooks editor?

I noticed that the editor at this moment for the biggest part concentrate around the XML/Java to Java mapping. Javabean binding is only a small part of what Smooks has to offer. Is it really valid then that the editor gets a 1.0.0 release number? If I think of a 1.0.0 release of the Smooks editor then I would expect that the editor has support for most of the features that Smooks has to offer. It is understandable that the first stable public releases of the editor don't have all the features. But wouldn't it be better to give this editor a version number like 0.1? That at least indicates that the editor doesn't have all the features one can expect.

Regards,

Maurice


View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4216351#4216351

Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&p=4216351



More information about the jboss-user mailing list