There’s a lot to reply to in your post, so let me try hit them one by one…

SEAM based Smooks UI:
- I’m not aware of any work taking place in this area. Our plans are purely based around Eclipse tooling.

Eclipse IDE Tool:
- Which one are you using? If you’re using any of the mappers from JBTools, then they are very limited indeed. This is what we are trying to address with the work that Dart, Brian and myself are collaborating on.

Cannot Supports:
- Re the list of things the current flavors of the Editor cannot support… sure, it can’t, but these are the types of things we will be adding to the editor. Smooks itself already supports many of these things, so it’s just a case of exposing them in the tooling. We can go into the specifics of each of the items you listed separately.

Questions related to problems…

Q: Is there some development in the pipeline that solve some of the mentioned problems here above?
A: These items would, at some stage, naturally come into the plans for the Eclipse tooling being worked on by JBoss. I don’t see them all being in the first version, or all appearing at once in a subsequent version, but I do see them arriving in a staged sequence over a number of releases. I think we need to get the correct foundation there first!! As I said, we can go into the specifics of each of the items you listed separately.

Q: Is it at all possible to solve the mentioned problems here above in Smooks / Eclipse?
A: Yes, I don’t see why not. Smooks itself supports a number of these concepts, so in theory it’s a matter of exposing these capabilities through the Editor.

Q: Is the Smooks development team looking for a challenge. We are willing to do commercial concessions when the development team will commit to solve these problems within an agreed timeline?
A: This effort is being driven by JBoss, so I’m afraid that this is a question for them.

In the design we have mentioned that Smooks will be used for transformation and mapping. But unfortunately Smooks cannot provide a GUI using SEAM framework. We solved this by using Eclipse IDE instead of SEAM to generate the GUI for mapping but still with Eclipse IDE we can only perform 1 to 1 , 1 to many (without lookup table/function/variables) and many to one(without lookup table/function/variables).

But the problems with Smooks/Eclipse IDE are

· Cannot support lookup tables
· Cannot support lookup functions
· Cannot support expression
· Cannot support Datatype convertion
· Cannot support variables/constant
· Cannot support generic Library function(add, sub)
· Cannot support decision function (if else)
· Cannot support user functions

We have the following questions related to the mentioned problems here above:

- Is there some development in the pipeline that solve some of the mentioned problems here above.
- Is it at all possible to solve the mentioned problems here above in Smooks / Eclipse.
- Is the Smooks development team looking for a challenge. We are willing to do commercial concessions when the development team will commit to solve these problems within an agreed timeline.

I look forward to hear from you.

Kind regards,

ELOG