Seeking feedback on the Smooks Configuration Editor redesign

Hi all...

I'm a new face/name on the blog, so I'll start with a bit of an introduction. :)

My name is Brian Fitzpatrick, but please just call me Fitz. Easier to remember. I used to work at Sybase and a few months ago defected to the side of open source. I've been involved with open source at Eclipse since sometime in 2006. I'm still involved with the Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) project, just not as much as I was while at Sybase.

At any rate, I'm now in the land of the Red Hat and helping with SOA tooling at the moment. Among the many things I've been working on has been helping with the Smooks Configuration Editor. We now have a couple of great guys working on the project - Dart and Tom - and between the three of us I think we've come up with a new way to look at Smooks configurations.



So we're looking for feedback on our proposed changes. You can read about them on our wiki here. And if you want to hop right to the meat of the matter, jump here. If you think the screens look a little odd, it's because we're using Basalmiq to create them (awesome tool btw).

Tom has even provided a bit of an animated version, so be sure to check that out.

Once again, I think Dart & Tom have done a great job pulling this stuff together design-wise. Now we just have to work out some implementation details. But Dart already has a good chunk of this stuff working, so we're getting there too.

If you have feedback, please put it in the wikis so we can capture it. We're all looking forward to what you have to say.

Thanks for your time!
--Fitz