Wireframesketcher to UI transformation

I'm developing an Ecore model for UI widgets and a renderer for SWT (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/UI/Toolkit_Model). Given a model instance, the renderer builds the corresponding SWT GUI and binds it to the model so that changes in the model are propagate to the SWT UI. Interaction with the SWT UI also affect the model as changes to special attributes.

Why is this relevant for Wireframesketcher? I've now started working on a transformation from WF's model to my UI model, so that WF models can be used for developing a functional application/prototype. The work is currently proof of concept, so I only support a couple of widgets.

In addition to the UI model, I've implemented Javascript support for EMF (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/UI/Toolkit_Model/org.eclipse.e4.emf.javascript). Since WF is EMF-based, it should be possible to script WF models, i.e. make a sketch interactive! The big question, however, is how such functionality should be made available for the UI designer. Any ideas?

Hi Hallvard,

This sounds exciting. I'll take a deeper look at the model although the general idea is clear to me as I am familiar with both SWT and Swing toolkits.

I'd really like to see how the model transformation works. Don't hesitate to propose changes to WireframeSketcher's model. I suspect that there could be more structure in some widgets like List, Table. I.e explicit Item objects.

I also have plans to open-source the model part so please don't hesitate to dig deeper into it.

Prototyping interactivity is a really interesting subject. I'm not sure if support for it should be added to WireframeSketcher but it's a hot subject nonetheless. Take a look at FlairBuilder for an example of how interactivity could be implemented in a prototyping tool.

Please keep me updated on your progress.