Lost the Designer

SuperOok · February 10, 2016, 7:27pm

Hi there,

with OH2 I started by manually porting my config files from OH1 with plain text editors. Now I wanted to have a look back at the Designer.

However, I’m a little lost in the documentation of OH2 and ESH as I can’t find the designer anymore. There seem to be some minor issues that foster my confusion:

https://github.com/openhab/openhab-distro shows a link “Eclipse SmartHome” with target https://github.com/openhab/openhab-distro/blob/master which gives a 404. I guess the link is wrong is it? The page does not mention the Designer at all.
https://github.com/openhab/openhab-distro/blob/master/docs/sources/getting-started.md Does not mention the Designer at all
http://www.eclipse.org/smarthome/getting-started.html does not mention the Designer at all. As only the roles “Hardware Manufacturer”, “Solution Vendor”, “Software Developer” are addressed there and not the end-user that wants to use the Designer, I don’t feel at the right place at ESH
http://www.eclipse.org/smarthome/documentation/index.html does not mention the Designer at all
https://github.com/eclipse/smarthome briefly mentions the Designer but states that ESH is no product at all and does not provide any pre-built download for the Designer. Do I really need to build it myself?

It feels a little like the Designer is no longer a first-class-citizen at ESH/OH2 anymore and its usage is somehow discouraged. However, as far as I understood, the admin web-configuration GUIs do not yet fully support the full configuration, so everyone has to stick with the text-files for some time.

As a big Eclipse and Xtext fan, I would pity tapering off the Xtext Designers…

Any hints where to get the Designer? Any idea about the mid-term plans and the documentation?

Cheers,
Hauke

danielwalters86 · February 10, 2016, 7:30pm

You didn’t look on the Eclipse Smarthome page properly! (It’s quite well hidden)

https://www.eclipse.org/smarthome/documentation/community/downloads.html

Kai · February 11, 2016, 10:51am

You are right, it isn’t really intensively advertised, but at least the Designer “is on display”.

The reason is the Designer is currently not in a good shape, see e.g. here and here.
The problem here is that I am the only person maintaining the Designer in the past years - there hasn’t been anybody actively contributing to it and helping on improving it. As this is quite some work and I simply don’t find the time for it besides all my other topics, the Designer is indeed a bit neglected.

So if you want to help improving it (and as an Eclipse/Xtext fan, you seem to be a good candidate for that), please help me on making the Designer nicely usable for openHAB 2 and once we feel that it is, we can refer to it much more openly from the openHAB 2 documentation

danielwalters86 · February 11, 2016, 12:09pm

Just as a thought, is there any of the structure of the designer that can be re-purposed as part of an online designer for OH2?

Kai · February 11, 2016, 12:28pm

This will be an even bigger refactoring, where I doubt that we will find any contributor to work on it. In theory, the very latest Xtext 2.9 supports web applications for the very first time, see https://eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation/330_web_support.html
We will soon update ESH to Xtext 2.9.1, so this could be an option, but I am not sure how well this is suited for embedded use or if it is rather targeting cloud deployments.
I think the more likely option as a web UI will be HABmin, which already now allows nice web editing of configurations.