Ergonomy matters: Configuration Dialogs

[schnucky.schuster]

Dear JBoss IDE Plugin Developers,

I very much value all the effort, you have put into the JBoss Plugin.
Please don't feel insulted about what I'm going to say about it.


Although configuration dialogs are a good idea - if they work like a whizzard, they are a very good starting point for the beginners - they have some mayor drawbacks in comparison to text editing.
In dialogs you need to constantly switch between mouse an keyboard and you can not use Cut and Paste. It get even worse if you have to envoke context menues and select items from them. It is the absolute opposite of ergonomic.

Let's take the XDoclet Configurations Dialog for an example. It is called Configurations Dialog, but it really is a full blown editor.
Given the ammount of data one need to insert, it would be much better just to use some kind of self made language or even XML in a simple old fashoned text editor.
The benefit of this would be:
- You could offer this handy little hovering windows containing usefull data like help, context information or command compleetion
- You could highlight inconsistencys or errors
- It would be so much more easy to handle and editting would be much faster


I believe if you keep this dessign pattern, your IDE will not be used in a production environment.

Please ask some senior developers you trust about their oppinion.

[maxandersen]

You are posting in the Portal plugin section ...?

Could you be more precise on what version of jboss ide/tools you are talking about ?

And please post in the jboss tools forum instead - thanks.

[schnucky.schuster]

Im speaking about the pluigin described in http://docs.jboss.com/jbosside/tutorial/build/en/html/index.html

I'm posting here, because the thread "XDoclet is broken using JBoss-IDE plugin and tutorial exampl" covers a simmilar issue.

Please be so kind to send me a link to the correct forum.

[maxandersen]

so this is about JBossIDE 1.6 which is old ;)

Go to http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=main&c=20

which are the more proper forums

and please try out jboss.org/tools before reporting more issues.

With respect to your comments on the dialog then sure it is not perfect but saying that this single dialog which is needed very seldom in day to day use is preventing the rest of the IDE from being used in production environment I will disagree with.

If you don't like it I recommend you try and use something like JEE5/ejb3 which removes the underlying need for even using xdoclet.