Spring Designer

[Koson]

I have been working on a visual editor for Spring configuration file. This editor called Spring Designer works like the Class Designer in Whidbey. It is a third-party package running in Visual Studio (Whidbey). Using this editor, we can visually construct relationships between objects. Properties are set through the Property window in VS. Only valid properties of the selected object are displayed in the window. The editor helps developer avoid common mistakes such as invalid property name, invalid XML format and injecting an invalid object type.

The editor is now in alpha stage, only work in VS2005 beta 2. I plan to open source this editor eventaully. If you are interested to try this editor now, please send me an email at kthambundit@liquidnet.com.

Koson

PS: Here is a screenshot of the editor.

http://www.geocities.com/boonma04/designer.JPG[/img]

[Rick Evans]

Hiya Koson

Wowee... hot dang! Mandinga! Schamoan! Forget talking to the hand, 'cos the face is listening!

That looks... cool I especially love the way you've just exploded out of the blue here :D I'll mail you forthwith and give you some feedback. I do use the Spring (for Java) plugin in the Eclipse IDE when I am doing Spring (for Java) related work, so well, cool.

Ciao
Rick

[Mark Pollack]

Hi Koson,

Wow! "There is no emoticon for how I am feeling" - though :mrgreen: comes close. I'd love to give it a whirl! emailing you now...

Cheers,
Mark

[Aleks Seovic]

Wow... is all I can say for now :D

This is exactly what I wanted to do but couldn't find enough spare time, except it probably looks better than what I'd be able to do :)

Thanks a lot man, I will definitely email you to get my hands on this baby, even if it only works with VS.NET 2005.

BTW, not to be greedy, but how difficult would be to do something like this for VS.NET 2003, as I'm assuming that's what most users are gonna be using for a while.

- Aleks

[Koson]

thank for your enthusiastic response. As for VS. NET 2003 support, it is not difficult but requires some efforts. This Designer is built on top of DSL framework (Domain Specific language). The main component from DSL I use in this Designer is its diagram rendering. If we want to support VS 2003, we need to replace this component with other diagram library. In fact, when II first started developing this Designer, I used other third-party library. So it is doable but we need to find a good diagram library to replace DSL's.

Koson

[jvinarub]

At work we think it's cool, too. I just don't want Koson to get too big a head over this...

[ivolved]

thank for your enthusiastic response. As for VS. NET 2003 support, it is not difficult but requires some efforts. This Designer is built on top of DSL framework (Domain Specific language). The main component from DSL I use in this Designer is its diagram rendering. If we want to support VS 2003, we need to replace this component with other diagram library. In fact, when II first started developing this Designer, I used other third-party library. So it is doable but we need to find a good diagram library to replace DSL's.

Koson

And that my friends is what I LOVE about DSL's. This is something you COULD do using UML/XMI/Custom parsing but with DSLs it's so MUCH simpler!

Thanks Koson for the effort!

Michael

edit: I'll be emailing you too!

[grant]

I've seen people doing cool stuff with the netron library. Specifically, Frans Bouma did very similar VS2005-type designers in LLBLGen using Netron.

http://netron.sourceforge.net/wp/
http://netron.sourceforge.net/wp/wp-images/GraphLibBaseClasses.jpg

http://www.xs4all.nl/~perseus/inheritance2.jpg

[Mark Pollack]

Hi,
Thanks for the links...I did manage to install the DSL toolkit for 2005 beta and play with it - boy did that take a while. Once we have more of the core features (data access in particular) in place we can start to take a look at this in more detail...unless anyone else wants to jump in. :wink:
Cheers,
Mark