projects ui recommendations

Chris Le Dantec writes:
 > Hey folks,
 > 
 > I'm sending this out to a wide group -please respond to
 > [email protected].
 > 
 > Here are the recommendations for UI changes to the Projects
 > System. The document is the result of going through the recorded
 > problems found in the Usability Study and matching up proposed
 > solutions with requirements placed on Projects by groups building
 > on top (J2SE, Mobile, Web Apps and Enterprise).

Some thoughts.

- I'm not sure I like the removal of the output and resource trees
  from the explorer. The explorer paradigm seems to me to be
  fundamentally designed to support drag-and-drop. If we remove the
  output and resource trees, we don't seem to be exploiting this drag
  and drop capability. Perhaps I'm more sensitive to this because in
  SE (nee EE) we would expect that this feature might get used more
  than in other editions, as logical applications would always be
  decomposed into multiple projects linked by output-resource
  relationships.

  An alternative would be to have a "project relationship view" that
  would omit sources and ONLY show outputs and resources. Perhaps even
  a spiffy graphical view would be good...planarizing a DAG into 2-D
  graph is much more comprehensible than a tree, which is necessarily
  limited since a tree can only show containment graphically, not
  arbitrary relationships.

- I confess I've never been crazy about the idea of an active
  project. For SE the "product" corresponding (at least in our current
  discussions) to the project group that holds the component projects
  (web module, ejb module, etc.) is, I think, to the user the "active
  project". For example if Netbeans itself were implemented with the
  project system, each module would presumably be a Netbeans project
  -- yet I would consider that I'm working on the "Sequoia project",
  not the "jwd project".

  This was one of the reasons I suggested earlier that there be a
  versionable scope that holds projects together that is a top-level
  singleton in the IDE...not necessary an outer project, but something
  like a Visual Studio "Solution", WebSphere "Enterprise Application"
  or WebLogic Workship "Application". Forcing this outer scope would
  make adding new projects to the group much cleaner, I think, and I
  don't think this would take away any functionality, though some
  tasks would necessarily be accomplished differently.

Peter