[ome-devel] Client Architecture: A Proposal

[Ilya Goldberg]

On Aug 24, 2004, at 8:53 AM, Joshua Moore wrote:

> The second concrete point is something I think that those on the Java 
> crew can speak to: how many times (per day) have you thought "If only 
> I had more {time|developers} I'd X"? If this is something that comes 
> up often and you're serious about it, then I think taking advantage of 
> something like the Eclipse platform will make a big difference.
>
> There are APIs for: optimized (i.e. JNI) filesystem operations, 
> defining views, drag-n-drop, preferences, searchable help, login, 
> caching, etc. etc. etc. All of the things that most GUI designers 
> would like to get around to, but because of regular business can't. 
> Plus a host of existing GPL'd code waiting to be used.

So we've come to a point where we've identified some missing features 
in Shoola.  The piece that we would most like to have is object 
caching.  This is a difficult problem due to our run-time extensible 
data model, and the flexible query mechanism in ome-java.  We can 
discuss the specifics off-list, and there's been some traffic about it 
already.  I'm not altogether sure that Eclipse can provide this kind of 
functionality, but I don't know much about it.

So here's a counter proposal.  You seem to know about Eclipse, so why 
not try building a plug-in for it to make an initial connection to OME 
and pull some of its primary objects out (Projects, Datasets, Images, 
etc).  If you can do it easily, and it provides missing functionality, 
then maybe everyone will join the band-wagon.  I think its easier to 
think about these things and evaluate them once there's some kind of 
proof of concept to look at - your vision made concrete.  Its not very 
difficult to build this initial connection - Doug did it once using the 
OS X development tools in an afternoon.  We decided against pursuing it 
because of the limited audience, but it illustrates that with the right 
tools something surprisingly functional can be built very quickly.

-Ilya