IT Mill Toolkit Forum

IT Mill Toolkit development team is currently polishing Testing Tools in order to be able to release it shortly. After that - what new features or issues we should focus on?

To rephrase, what could we do for you?

Some of the things in pipeline (in no order) include:

Open all of the Trac, including roadmaps, to make development more open

Open SVN repository to make development more open

Integrated flash charts

Liferay integration (embedding Toolkit applications as portlets)

WISIWYG layout-editor

Make use of the GWT widgets easier without server-side

Kill the rest of the known bugs

Better examples and new blueprints

Any opinions on these? Which are the most important to you?

Opening up the issue tracker and SVN repository sound great! Also, better examples of how to use the data model would be useful, because the current examples are too simplistic.

just my 2 cents

Kaitsu wrote:

Opening up the issue tracker and SVN repository sound great! Also, better examples of how to use the data model would be useful, because the current examples are too simplistic.

Thanks for proposal. A CRUD UI example is planned for next RnD SCRUM Sprint

We are in process of moving customer support tickets to separate Trac in order to be able to open Trac. SVN is mirrored to Trac machine and read-only access could be opened in parallel with Trac.

Joonas Lehtinen wrote:

WISIWYG layout-editor

Does that mean What I See Is What You Get?

more examples w/ tutorials

Joonas Lehtinen wrote:

IT Mill Toolkit development team is currently polishing Testing Tools in order to be able to release it shortly. After that - what new features or issues we should focus on?

Here's some small improvements I'd like to see. (We've already filed some of these, but since you asked...

)

TextField should support Input Prompt pattern (i.e. a help text that disappears when user clicks the field) out of the box.

Alternatively, it should be possible to react to onFocus events in Java, so we can implement this ourselves.

Possibility to add basic tooltips (HTML's title attribute) to Buttons (and why not TextFields, etc). It seems you can't do this now - please let me know if I'm wrong...

Joni

Kaitsu wrote:

Joonas Lehtinen wrote:

WISIWYG layout-editor

Does that mean What I See Is What You Get?

Ehhh... Could be that way too... Anyways - we are planning to add new Layout to IT Mill Toolkit that allows visual editing of component positions easily as well as scalable layouting without any coding...

I would consider this to be a bug: "TextField should support Input Prompt pattern (i.e. a help text that disappears when user clicks the field) out of the box."

=> Filed a bugreport...

jonik wrote:

Possibility to add basic tooltips (HTML's title attribute) to Buttons (and why not TextFields, etc). It seems you can't do this now - please let me know if I'm wrong...

Just noticed that Toolkit does support this, I just didn't know it's called "description".

So this works fine.

Code:

button.setDescription("tooltip")

Joni

WISIWYG editor would be nice. Better examples and new blueprints - yes, for sure. Also, easier use of GWT widgets. Ah, and lots and lots of new components (I look forward to be able to use the new com.itmill.toolkit.ui.MenuBar).

Current vision for the next steps is:

1) Kill the rest of the bugs and drop "beta" status

2) Better eclipse integration. Maybe something like this: http://dev.itmill.com/raw-attachment/ticket/98/ToolkitEclipsePlugin%20-%20draft%201.pdf

3) Wysiwyg editor

4) Example application that should knock-your-socks-off

Other things scheduled for this year include
- Better showcase for Liferay integration
- More data-layer implementations for easier integration with backend
- Some dropping support for Java 1.4 and adding some features that utilize new features of Java 1.5
- Finishing some new components, including: Menubar, CoordinateLayout, Coverflow and PopupEditor

But - as we try to be agile, plans probably will change many times over...

Any comments on these?

2) Better eclipse integration. Maybe something like this: http://dev.itmill.com/raw-attachment/ticket/98/ToolkitEclipsePlugin%20-%20draft%201.pdf

3) Wysiwyg editor

The draft for the plugin looked nice! Could/should there be a possibility to add some portlet generation options too? The problem as I see it is that portals require their own description files, so we should have to decide wether to generate only files required by the standard or also the portal container specific ones.

4) Example application that should knock-your-socks-off

Hooray!

- Better showcase for Liferay integration

Since Toolkit works on the JBoss Portal now also, in my opinion it could be wise to see that the portlet showcases which aren't dependent on something Liferay specific, would work on JBoss too. There should not be more than two(ish) additional xml-files required.

Jonas Granvik wrote:

The draft for the plugin looked nice! Could/should there be a possibility to add some portlet generation options too? The problem as I see it is that portals require their own description files, so we should have to decide wether to generate only files required by the standard or also the portal container specific ones.

That is a great idea. We already have scripts to generate liferay descriptors from web.xml (with special comments). Those should be integrated to ide. Somehow.

Jonas Granvik wrote:

Since Toolkit works on the JBoss Portal now also, in my opinion it could be wise to see that the portlet showcases which aren't dependent on something Liferay specific, would work on JBoss too. There should not be more than two(ish) additional xml-files required.

True... IDE should let you to select "Target portal" and then generate compatible descriptors.