SWF GUI editor

[pkozlowski]

Dear All,

First of all, I would like to thank you so much for all your time spent on Spring IDE. It rally great and useful project.

Recently I was giving SWF a test drive and I was delighted to see, that there is support for a graphical overview of a flow. Currently, I’m trying to migrate an old application from a proprietary flow subsystem to SWF and a graphical overview is a very important element of the whole puzzle.

Unfortunately, when I’ve transformed number of existing flows and was trying to display them using SpringIDE, well …, let’s say that the resulting picture was not very readable… I’m attaching a screenshot of a real flow from my old application to illustrate what I mean but “not very readable”.



I know that laying out a graph like this is not a trivial task, but I would like to ask if there any plans to improve things in the future? Change a drawing algorithm? Store additional UI information with a flow?

I would be really grateful for any info. It would be enough for me to know if someone is currently working in this area.

Cheers,
Pawel

[Christian Dupuis]

Hi Pawel,

that is indeed not looking very useful. The problem with this picture is the layout algorithm Spring IDE uses under the hood. We leverage the Directed Grap Layout that comes with Eclipse's GEF (Graphical Editing Framework).

There is already an open ticket for this in our issue tracker. We are definitely planning on allowing manual tweaking of the layout (incl. persisting the layout) for an upcoming release. But I do not expect that to be part of 2.0 final. Sorry.

Cheers

Christian

[pkozlowski]

Ok, thank you so much for the feedback! I’ll keep my eye on the ticket 548.

Thnx once again, cheers,
Pawel