From:
gmf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:gmf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Steven Shaw
Sent: Tuesday, November 08, 2005
9:13 AM
To: GMF Project developer
discussions.
Cc: GMF Project developer
discussions.; gmf-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [gmf-dev] GMF runtime
complexity makes it hard for clients to benefit from its power
Hello Henrik,
Thanks
for your feedback. The complexity certainly can be overwhelming due to
the power of the infrastructure for extensibility and as a platform across
domains. There is a programmers guide for the diagram plugins under
construction that hasn't been published yet in the SDK. This would
include some basic interaction diagrams describing how the creation process
invokes the different services (View, EditPart, EditPolicy etc.). This
should be available in M4.
There
is also some planned investigation on simplifying the service schema to avoid
some of the complex XML tags that are needed to define providers. These
are currently necessary to avoid loading a plugin simply to determine enablement
or provides criteria for a provider. With the introduction of the OSGI
bundles some of this complexity could be potentially eliminated allowing the
logic to be centralized in the java source. (This needs to be
investigated further...)
Re:
log --> There is advanced tracing option available that can be activated
that should let you see trace data logged by services. In the Debug
dialog, if you navigate to the "Tracing" tab and turn on "Enable
tracing for the selected plug-ins".
Regards,
Steve.
________________________________________
Steven R. Shaw
Rational Modeling Platform Diagram Layer Lead
Rational Software | IBM Software Group
770 Palladium Drive, Kanata,
ON, Canada,
K2V 1C8
tel: 613.591.7979
steveshaw@xxxxxxxxxx
Henrik Rentz-Reichert
<hrr@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent
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11/08/2005 04:46 AM
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[gmf-dev] GMF runtime complexity makes it
hard for clients to benefit from its power
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Hi all,
currently I'm implementing a simple example using the GMF runtime.
I tried to follow the lines of the logic example (which is fairly complex though).
Obviously the framework is extremely powerful. But its complexity also puts a
high burden on its clients. My experience up to now is that it is very
difficult to trace problems back to their origin. This is partly due to the
complex interactions of the framework with the providers defined by the client.
Especially registering the clients via extension points is very error prone and
problems are hard to detect.
Some examples:
- it took me quite a long time to realize that the
DiagramKind of the Wizard page has to be in sync with the corresponding
entry in the ViewProvider
- I missed to derive an EditHelper from
MSLEditHelper which led to an exception in a context that was extremely
hard to analyze
- in general declarations in the plugin.xml
interact via services and service providers with user written code. There
are many places where strings here and there have to coincide literally
which can lead to subtle errors which are typically very hard to detect
for a GMF runtime novice
Now my questions:
- Is there a document (sequence diagrams would be
great) that illustrates the interaction of framework instances with user
defined code?
- Is a log file written with registry information
of the GMF runtime services? Or alternatively: can I get information of this
kind using certain tracing switches? This kind of information could be
extremely helpful
Kind regards,
Henrik
--
..................................................
Dr. Henrik Rentz-Reichert mailto://hrr@xxxxxxxxx
Hafnerstr. 1
fon +49-7533-9342-43
D-78476 Allensbach fax
-44
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