MyEclipse is Cool !!!

MyEclipse 6.0 GA has been released in August 2007 with a some cool features aiming at developers productivity. I just downloaded their 30 day trial version and played around little bit for two days. I was developing a AJAX and SOAEclipse IDE for my client; i was particularly interested to look into the ajax and database capabilities from MyEclipse.

Noticeable features from the 6.0 GA release includes (see myeclipse for complete list of features)…

• Europa eclipse distribution compatibility
• Integrated Libraries (for Java EE 5, JPA, Struts 1.1-1.3, Hibernate 2-3.2, Spring 1.2-2.0, etc…)
• Integrated Tomcat 6.0 Server
• Integrated Derby Server (10.2.2)
• Java Persistence Tools
• Visual JSF designer and Flow editor
• AJAX Tools
• Matisse4MyEclipse Swing Visual Designer

Ajax debugging capabilities are awesome from MyEclipse. They tried to provide most of the capabilities from the Firefox’s FireBug.

• It has the JavaScript Inspector to look-into the scripts loaded by the webpage.
• JavaScript Console to look into any kind of errors happening on the particular browser. One of the important issue that i was looking is to change the underlying browser that the page renders so that i can see the errors/warnings/info depending on the browser(IE/FF/SF). Some how i could not find this capability (perhaps i am missing something).
• Ajax Request Monitor is another great tool to see how many ajax requests are happening on the page. It also shows the Request/Response along with Headers and Body. This is very helpful for debugging any kind of ajax requests to indicate time, status and request and response.
• DOM Source view is very useful to see the code for a selected DOM node. The DOM Inspector view enables the developer to select any node on the dom and it highlights the specific area in the WebPage. This is great feature for the developer as he can see and inspect the inner elements from DOM.

I found the Java Persistence Perspective is very useful with DbBrowser, Table/Object Info, SQL Editor, Results, and Table Edit capabilities.

• How cool is it for a developer to be able to connect to different databases (via DB Browser), select the tables and view the table Info (via Table/Object Info) and the edit the tables if needed (via Edit Table).
• SQL Editor allows to select the different data base connections and then execute the query on a specific table or view. The query results are displayed in the SQL Results view. A developer oriented feature is to be able to copy the results on to the clipboard.
• I really liked the ease with which we can add a capability; some of the capabilities include Add Web Service Capabilities, Add Tapestry Capabilities, Add Struts Capabilities, Add Spring Capabilities, Add JPA Capabilities, Add JSTL Capabilities. All these capabilities can be added by a single click. Configuration files and property files are automatically generated for the developer.
• Java Persistence perspective enables to be able to select a table and create code supporting the persistence capabilities. Persistence mechanisms like JPA, Hibernate and EJB3 are supported via this feature (they call it reverse engineering… from table to code).

Last but not the least, Installing the MyEclipse examples dynamically is a great feature. User can decide what he wants and then he can get a full running application. I really like the bundling of the Tomcat and Derby so that all the minimal set of pre-requisites are satisfied.

Overall, working on MyEclipse was a great experience for me. All the mentioned features definitely improve developers productivity to a greater extent.

Is “Naked Objects” trying to address similar problems as “EMF” ?

Yesterday i was going through the article from the Naked Objects about their platform and architecture. Once i gone through some of their articles and website, i had an impression that its also solving subset/similar set of problems solved by EMF.

For the ones who is not familiar with the Naked Objects, its “an open source Java-based application development platform. It’s called Naked Objects because all you need to develop are your domain objects – the Naked Objects platform auto-creates an object-oriented user interface (giving you the choice of different styles) and the underlying database (using Hibernate)“.

Thus the developer has to develop only the domain model and the UI and Persistence mechanism is auto-generated by the platform. I tried to draw some categories on which i felt Naked Objects is in similar lined as EMF.

Domain Model : Naked Objects requires the entire domain model to be developed in plain java and the domain validations to be described in each of the domain class. That means that domain class will contains the data + behavior + validations. Last but not the lease, each class must implement a NakedObject interface.

All the eclipse projects that i have worked on till date, have EMF models designed as domain models. Mostly created right from the scratch (Omondo, Together, or plain ECore Editor) or from schema. In my view i have always used custom diagnostics/validations for each domain class. In principle i do have my validations on each class.

UI Generation : Naked Objects framework does generate the Web and RCP kind of UIs. I have seen the demos of both the UI and its definitely appealing.  At this point of time, i am not sure how they tackled the “Separation of Concerns”. I really like the differentiation between the View, Content and Label providers level. Not sure if we do have the access to change the editors and custom UI thats generated.

Of course regarding EMF, it does generate the Edit and Editor Plugins along with the Model. I love this separation of concerns about the Content and Labels for the Viewers.  Though the generated editor does contain different kinds of editors, i am at will to change them. I can change what ever i want from this Editor.

Rapid Application Development : Yes in my view both of them does support a very fast development of applications and validation of concepts (though i have not used Naked Objects, i am making this claim on what is mentioned their site and what i have seen in demos) .

In the end i guess in both the frameworks, developers will need to change the UI. As i believe we do need some custom User Interface all the time. Every customer is unique and every customer wants a different UI.

Persistence : Naked Objects claims that it can persist the data directly via hibernate. I feel this is a real good feature, as many a times i do need a persistence mechanism. I would say this is definitely an advancement.

EMF does provide the XML and XMI as the default persistence mechanisms. I did use the Oracle Toplink as a persistence layer for EMF. Of course we do also have the hibernate support, but i have not personally used it.

Interesting thing would be if Naked Objects working with Eclipse. That means i get a similar UI and Persistence mechanism in addition to what EMF provides.