design-first / design-first/system-designer

Menu driven everything

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#117 4 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
HTML
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Description

This is a feature request to create a visual edit mode for defining schema. Something like a 2 column table with the property names on one side and values on another. If the value is an array or object just show a button to drill down into the collection. Additional properties and values can be added in a similar fashion as adding rows to a table control inside of a Google doc or MS Word file.

Basically, if I can do everything through drag and drop on my mobile phone, only have to type out the names of things and behavior methods, and never need to look at JSON, then this will be absolutely amazing.

Here's an example of a visual IDE for modeling decision trees.
https://fxdreema.com
I don't know what tools are used to create that UI but it's quite impressive. I'm not a fan of the code it generates, but it is really good at allowing me to rapidly develop ideas.

Nice example IDEs are MySQL workbench and the Database Designer tools in Visual Studio. It would be really neat to see a UML WYSIWYG designer that works on phones or from a web page and generates what you're already generating. Somewhere inside the database modeling tools and the fxdreema web thing there's probably an idea and a real way of making a great new tool.

This is something I've thought about doing before, I've just never seen anyone else psyched about making functional code from diagrams. I think it's the future of programming because it shortcuts the learning curve and gets directly to visualizing object orientation, which is what we all do anyway. Just a good visual modeler and a few lessons in the most basic programming could probably allow fifth graders to create powerful applications. Blockly sort of did that, but it's not quite what this here could be.

Your project is interesting.

Contributor guide

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Research direction

The issue names no files, tests, or entry points; start by surveying the project’s existing schema-editing and generated-output interfaces. Done would require an agreed, bounded scope for visual editing, including nested values and drag-and-drop changes, with testable acceptance criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
design, devtools, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
15/100

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