Hopefully I won't repeat too much of what others have said ...
I agree with Andrus that it would be nice to have Cayenne Modeler integrated within Eclipse, but that doesn't help those who use IntelliJ, JBuilder, NetBeans, Emacs (sorry Kevin), etc. A standalone modeler is the most flexible. This wouldn't prevent setting up something in Eclipse to auto-run the modeler, though, when you click on a Cayenne XML file.
Spindle does indeed help Tapestry development, but it is Eclipse-only (see comments above). What Tapestry could really use is a standalone visual editor (like WebObjects Builder), but that would require much more work. Of course, I suppose that's a bigger issue for the Tapestry community than this list.
The refactoring issue has been discussed here before. It is really problematic. Different databases have different features (or lacks thereof). I remember using Oracle and not being able to drop or rename a column, but maybe they've fixed that by now? Also, even if that kind of support were available in your DB, it's really only useful in a development DB. I'd never ever ever point Cayenne Modeler at a production DB and click a mystical "refactor" button. I would need scripts that I could keep in CVS/Subversion/etc to update the production DB. And if I have scripts, I might as well use them to update the lower environments, too (need to test/debug them first, anyway). The best solution (in my opinion, of course) is to write your SQL update script, run it (make sure it works), then manually update your model to reflect the changes. There are even more issues involved, but I hope that made a little sense. Automatic refactoring of adds/deletes/renames/etc sounds great, but I think it is snake oil in actual practice.
So ... My thoughts would be to mainly improve the modeler (standalone), but make it possible to work as a plugin, too. Of course, I don't even know how to make a button in a Java GUI (I could help out doing Cocoa :-), so I don't know the issues involved with the plugin approach.
/dev/mrg
-----Original Message-----
From: Øyvind Harboe [mailto:oyvind.harbo..ylin.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 6:36 AM
To: cayenne-use..bjectstyle.org
Subject: Eclipse Cayenne plugin
I've been using Cayenne, Tapestry, Spindle & Eclipse for a little while
now and here is a quick dump of what a Cayenne Eclipse plugin might
address.
While the Cayenne GUI is great, any self-respecting OR mapper should
aspire to have an Eclipse plugin these days. :-)
- Be like Spindle. Anyone who are thinking about creating a Cayenne
Eclipse plugin should take Spindle for a spin. It basically smartens
up the editing of Tapestry .xml/.html files by coloring, ctrl-space
completion and various other operations. Using the same approach
shold also realize synergy effects w/Spindle+Tapestry.
- Add outline view w/add+rename+delete fields/relations, etc. operations
- refactoring with roundtripping support.
By this I mean the ability to e.g. rename a database field and have
the Cayenne files be updated, or vice versa.
- add database field to table. This should update the classes,
database and Cayenne xml files.
Are there any Cayenne Eclipse plugin efforts underway?
-- Øyvind Harboe http://www.zylin.com
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