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Talk:E4/DeclarativeUI/Styling Roundup

Copied this from the main page. Yves, if you agree with this you can remove it there and this header line.


UI Modeling

Adding to the mentioned languages in the table on the main page one can make use of a Platform independent UI Modeling language that specifies the intent of the UI, but not the technical implementation. By cleanly separating the intentions from the technical implementation you can have a single set of specifications generated into several target platforms. StUIML does this and I hope te be able to contribute the metamodel this summer to the PMF (Presentation Modeling Framework) project as soon as I get the green light at my current project. The current tooling around StUIML makes extensive use of EMF and related technology.

--Jim van Dam 11:36, 28 May 2008 (GMT)

Thanks Jim for adding this tropic. In fact, I wonder if your intent of the UI is same as what I said "Abstraction of GUI". In my opinion, a declarative UI needs first a Platform Independent UI MARKUP (instead of modeling) language (PIUIML), which is implemented obviously in EMF. The UI Markup language must be abstract. I prefer referring the modeling language to high level concept.

Useless to say that the PIUIML model is very important for development tools. It can be used directly by Visual editor or/and indirectly by domain modelers via PMF.

--Yves YANG 09:42, 28 May 2008 (EDT)

I agree for the most part, but there is an important difference between something like XAML and what I call a platform independent UI modeling language. XAML talks about checkbox, textblock, scrollbar and radiobutton and although these exist in variations on all platforms they are still platform specific. To use this language everywhere you would have to implement a renderer for the language on all platforms. A supplementary approach could be to separate the technical 'widget' choice from the functional. PMF will talk about editing properties, managing a collection and a sequence of dialogues instead of the widgets mentioned above. You can then create generators for every technical platform without changing your specification. As the UI technical space is moving quickly this makes it easier to keep up and maintain a single set of specifications. I am not sure if this approach is appropriate for E4 and it can be supplemental to a Declarative UI, but I wanted to mention the possibility in the light of our upcoming efforts on PMF.

--Jim van Dam 07:16, 30 May 2008 (GMT)

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