<snip from Bob Cancilla>
The whole point of EGL is to hide the underlying technology so
you don't have to deal with it.
</snip>
While I believe a lot of programmers will appreciate that EGL hides underlying technology (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Java, J2EE, etc.), the problem expressed by Tim when he originated this thread, and other similar frustrations which could occur, may be an indication that EGL goes too far in hiding underlying technology.
I was looking at Rational's documentation for the dataGrid component and compared with with the JSF specification and other documentation from other tool vendors who are supporting JSF, and the abstractions seem so high-level in some contexts, and so similar to HTML in other contexts, that it makes me wonder what value JSF is trying to add.
Many JSF dataGrid attributes map directly to HTML table attributes (bgcolor, border, cellpadding, cellspacing, id, style, styleClass, title, width), while other HTML table attributes are excluded from the JSF specification. In one case a developer may be wondering why have an extra tool just to define a standard HTML element, and in another case they may wonder why many of the HTML attributes weren't included in the JSF specification?
If you use a standard HTML editor like Dreamweaver, you not only have complete access to the table element, with all it's attributes, but you also have full access to the header, footer, row, and cell elements that may be defined in the table. However, if you're restricted to the JSF dataGrid specification - it appears that you're constrained.
I guess it's really cool to be able to drag and drop a UI component
onto a design surface, and bind it with a data component, and magically
see a list of records appear on the screen, but it may not be worth the
frustration of trying to get things to work outside the box.
Nathan M. Andelin
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