Where to find documentation

[liechtir]

Hi guys

Exadel had some documentation/tutorials how to create own custom component descriptions for the VPE.
I'm not able to find those docs on EXADEL.com nor on the jboss homepages anywhere.

Is there a description around?
At that time, I managed to create custom components that are visualized, but I need to know what methods are supported. Like the src to load image files into the visualization for example.

I was also able to create this in MyEclipse(I have to compare those tools to see which better fits our requirements), they got a cool tutorial around:
http://myeclipseide.com/images/tutorials/jsfdesigner_extension/

Is it possible for RHDS to use an own eclipse project as well? So our customers could easily install the custom components visualizations by a remote update site?

Thanks a lot,
remo

[maxandersen]

I don't recall seeing any tutorial on this; I just look at the current examples. I'll ask if they have it around.

Is it possible for RHDS to use an own eclipse project as well? So our customers could easily install the custom components visualizations by a remote update site?

what do you mean ? if you bundle your custom templates within a plugin then yes it can be done via an remote update site.

[liechtir]

yeah exadel had a pdf around somewhere, about 4 pages long.not much but it worked...

I thought the xml templates need to be in plugins/org.jboss.tools.vpe_2.0.0.beta4 ?
At least that's what exadel wrote in that documentation.

how do I tell the VPE then that my templates are in my own eclipse plugin?

[liechtir]

okay found that one

http://exadel.com/exadelstudio/help/vpe/JSPVisualEditorTemplatesExtension.pdf

but it's not the pdf i was looking for but it answers my last question

[liechtir]

I was looking for that one

finally found it....

http://exadel.com/exadelstudio/help/vpe/JSPVisualEditorTemplates.pdf

[maxandersen]

Ah - I saw those once but were informed they were not uptodate. If they work then excellent ;)

We will look into making this more available (and have a stable API) after GA of RHDS.

[maxandersen]

I just got a link from Exadel: http://www.exadel.com/exadelstudio/help/vpe/index.html

provides you with some more info.

[liechtir]

yeah they're pretty old but with a lucky hand you're able to think where the things have to go and how, so ;-)

I'm looking forward to a more up to date documentation then.

other question: why do you guy not sit together with MyEclipse and WTP to define a common standard of how such custom components can be described? Everbody has an own solution so there is no common thing in it, if somebody would like to switch from one IDE to another he has to create all descriptions again.

both of you guys have advantages and disadvanteges in your way of description, so keep the best things and put them togehter ;-)

[maxandersen]

Short version: if you look you will notice that all of these are rather implementation dependent so unless we share the same engine then it's not really doable for the kind of flexibility needed.

Long version: JSF (or rather any visual component model) have always had this weakness that their runtime is not possible to reuse for rendering it at designtime, but I know some jcp specs are trying to improve on this.

So sure - if there came out a usable spec for this we would definitly look into it; but I don't think we can avoid the implementation specific parts for now.

[liechtir]

okay then so let's see what the future brings ;)

[liechtir]

Ah - I saw those once but were informed they were not uptodate. If they work then excellent ;)

We will look into making this more available (and have a stable API) after GA of RHDS.

Hi max,

are there some news? I have to take a deeper look into this again ;-)

Thanks,
Remo

[maxandersen]

News in wether we have a more public API ? Then no, we don't have that currently.

The current base is what we have - try and use it and give feedback so we know what works and what does not work for you who want to provide extensions on top of it.

[liechtir]

Sorry I was thinking about the documentation PDFs that were linked in that thread before, so I thought maybe you guys have update the documentation with a tutorial or how to something like that.

Otherwise I get in touch with it again and find out once more, I don't have my old solution anymore ;-)

[maxandersen]

I did a smalltalk presentation at EclipseCon about this but I haven't had time to write it down in consumable form yet.

One of the things I used as input to this was http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBIDE-1304 which shows how to do an docbook editor with VPE.

Extremely simple ;)

[liechtir]

can you please put a link here when you wrote that stuff down? would be helpful I think. nice idea with the docbook editor by the way, there is not a good one out for eclipse at the moment... I think it would help the developers if you create a new jboss module just with that, even if it's simple one!) docbook editor... if this would have been around one year ago then we would not have choosed robohelp to generate our online doc ;-)