Re: UI toolkit for the future Modeler

A few random thoughts.


## Integrations

If Modeler changed to another language or UI library, could it leverage 
that to better integrate with other tooling?

For example, could making parts of the modeler a js library allow it to 
work with existing js database modelers like Vertabelo 
https://my.vertabelo.com/try-db-designer



Here are some desktop app database modelers I found:

* https://www.toadworld.com/products/toad-data-modeler

* https://www.mysql.com/products/workbench/

* https://www.idera.com/products/er-studio/enterprise-data-modeling

* https://sparxsystems.com/products/ea/

* https://astah.net/



## Building on an existing platform

Is it worth examining DBeaver to see whether Cayenne functionality could 
be added on top of the existing ERD features? 
https://dbeaver.com/docs/wiki/ER-Diagrams


What would be involved in making Cayenne modeler an Eclipse or Intellij 
plugin? Would that increase market awareness, especially if the IDE 
could be made more aware of how to handle Cayenne annotations.


## Competing implementations

It is worth looking at the feature set over here:

https://tools.jboss.org/features/hibernate.html#hibernate-console


I like the idea of converting a query into SQL in order to understand 
what it is doing. But of course that needs a modeler which can talk to 
the Java Cayenne library and might rule out a pure browser/js 
implementation. Rather it might look like the Cayenne server library 
with some sort of rest API to serve the front end. Cayenne as a service, 
if you will.



## Browser/cloud modeler

A modeler which runs inside a browser reduces the barrier to entry 
hugely. Imagine going to a demo website, uploading your database schema 
and being able to instantly play with your schema and output a working 
Java project.


## Developer skills

Does anyone in the existing team have js skills?



Ari




On 11/12/21 7:15pm, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
> A datapoint to our perennial discussion of technology to use for the future CayenneModeler... With Swing being old and crusty, and JavaFX no longer supported by Oracle, perhaps we should be looking for something fresh. I just came across a new "Compose Multiplatform" desktop UI framework by JetBrains [1]. It is programmed in Kotlin and is based on Google toolkit for Android. Their GitHub examples [2] are not that visually impressive, but I would imagine it is a matter of styling. A million $ question is whether it will be around and open source in 10-15 years.
>
> Anyone knows anything about it?
>
> Andrus
>
> [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/compose-mpp/
> [2] https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/blob/master/artwork/readme/apps.png
>
>