I know I've brought this up before, but I don't believe we really
decided on anything (or did anything), so here goes again ...
What do you think about changing the default behavior of Cayenne and
the Modeler to look for directory wrappers for the Cayenne XML files
instead of looking for cayenne.xml? Here are the changes and
advantages as I see them:
* Have Cayenne Modeler save the XML files (cayenne.xml, etc) into a
Cayenne wrapper directory of your naming, such as MyModel.cayenne (it
would append the .cayenne, which is the wrapper signature). You could
also have MyOtherModel.cayenne in the same directory.
* Have Cayenne resolve all *.cayenne wrappers at the root of the
CLASSPATH upon startup. This will make it easier to support multiple
models and also utilize models in other frameworks. For legacy
support, also look for cayenne.xml if no *.cayenne wrappers are found.
(I suppose it could also add cayenne.xml regardless of if *.cayenne
wrappers are found.) It might seem like a performance hit to look for
all *.cayenne, but most things at the root of the CLASSPATH are
directories like "org" or "com", so it seems to me the scanning would
be minimal.
* The *.cayenne wrapper directories could be "branded" with a Cayenne
logo (at least on OS X, not 100% sure about other OS's).
* The *.cayenne wrapper can be double-clicked to launch Cayenne
Modeler (again, on OS X, hopefully on other OS's too).
* It is easier to copy a model around in a GUI (drag and drop one
"file") instead of select multiple files.
There might be other advantages, too. Those are just the ones off the
top of my head. I can't think of any real negatives to this, either,
but feedback is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
/dev/mrg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Wed Dec 19 2007 - 09:32:59 EST