dynamic EMF SWT Views (not only) for Business Applications

…back from the redView – “RoadShow“: Eclipse Democamps in Frankfurt, Vienna (presented by Flo) and Hamburg – also NightSchool at W-JAX and OpenSource Expo in Karlsruhe. This time the Eclipse Democamps were all crowded: the winner was Hamburg with more then 110 attendees.

I like the Eclipse Democamps: see what happens in other projects, always learning something new, interesting discussions… and of course later in the evening meeting friends and drinking some beer. Thanks to all the Organizers, Sponsors and Eclipse Foundation to make these events possible. For me as a self-employed independent Software Architect its an easy way to get in contact with some hundred developers from Eclipse universe living in my country

It was great to demonstrate redView at Democamps and its good to see how many developers are interested to learn more about this project. We’re finishing some final steps to prepare the launch of a first beta of redView this month. Really: otherwise I have to spend a bottle of good redwine to Christian Campo and I would prefer to get one from his wine cellar

redView Slides with audio available

Some asked me to publish my slides from redView – presentation, but these are “Zen“-like, so I added audio and uploaded as movie at Vimeo -

You can watch the slides here.

The slides are only one part of the redView demonstration: there was always also a “live demo” part. So I created some screencasts:

Screencast: First Steps with redView’s WYSIWYG Designer

Click here to view the Screencast at Vimeo.

A simple example about redView Designer Editor, Outline, Properties and how to change design by Drag-n-drop, Properties or from Outline.

The real power behind redView is the combination with openArchitectureWare (Eclipse Modeling: MWE, Xpand/Xtend, Xtext) if you generate your redView Views. Together with Eclipse Runtime (Equinox, Riena) you can even generate a complete Riena RCP Application with UI and Navigation. With redView Eclipse Modeling meets Eclipse Runtime: its a perfect association.

Screencast: Live-Pushing of Design-Changes into running RCP Applications (using CDO)

Click here to view the screencast at Vimeo.

In this screencasts there are two (generated) Riena RCP Applications running: one under OSX, the other one under Linux Ubuntu. Then inside the IDE the UI Designer makes some changes and these are pushed live into the running RCP Applications. This can be very useful while testing new Views together with the business departments. Thanks to CDO the EMF SWT Views are stored on a server anywhere so all can be done a distributed way.

Screencast: redView’s Visibility Processor

Click here to view the screencast at Vimeo.

redView provides Visibility Processor, Visibility Desriptors and Visibility Conflict resolver. This is an example with nested Views to design Associations with Superclasses. Imagine a Driver who drives a Vehicle. Vehicle is an abstract class and this could be a Car or a Truck.

In your SWT View you need the fields of Car or Truck displayed inside a Composite. Imagine how much code this would be and see how easy you define it using redView.

redView at EclipseCon 2010 – redView and e4

Curious to see what will happen at EclipseCon – there are already some discussions how to get redView under Eclipse Umbrella. redView will also be a perfect addition to e4 – we’ll provide next year redView as a ViewPart for e4 workbench.

If you like redView and want to see more, then please comment and vote for my Submissions at EclipseCon 2010:

Dynamic EMF Views (not only) for OSGI Business Applications

- a short Talk (25 Min)

Modeling meets Runtime: In 2 Hours from your Domain Model to a running RCP Application together with UI Designer

I promise: you leave the session with a running RCP Application, the redView UI – WYSIWYG Designer and Views stored on a CDO Server.

BTW: there are also submissions about PDE + Cool Views from Target Platform and Logging in OSGI Applications

wonderful new world of UI design at eclipse

If you’re following e4 developer list discussions you know that there are some new tools and frameworks to design UI in eclipse. These are great news for all developers of RCP or RAP applications per ex. Sometimes discussions at e4 dev-list sounds like a war between different UI concepts – curious what will find the way into e4.

Here are some interesting concepts of a (model-driven) UI:

Wazaabi 2.0 is a declarative UI framework based on live EMF models. Wazaabi provides a live update using EMF Reflexive Editor if running in the same VM. Please read more at Oliviers Blog.

XWT is a declarative UI framework designed for Eclipse, based on XML. You can get more info also at Yves Yang’s Blog. There’s also a new WYSIWYG editor for XWT, which will become part of VE.

TM – Toolkit Model is an EMF model of the user interface (UI) components. TM provides a Model Editor built on the reflective Ecore editor and supports editing of both Toolkit Model resources and resources containing sample data.

UFacekit is another great Toolkit: UFacekits scope is to develop highlevel API and framework modules to develop applications in a widget-toolkit independent fashion which are small and easy to extend.

If you have to design very complex and difficult SWT UI, then perhaps the only way is to use a UI Designer like Instantiations SWT Designer – the tool with the best UI itself.

From my POV there’s not the one-and-only tool which fits all your needs – it always depends from your project requirements and its good to have a choice.

And its not the end of the story

The next weeks I’ll tell you the story about redView (Riena – EMF – Dynamic Views for Business Applications): there’ll be screencasts, documentation, and demos (Eclipse Democamps in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Vienna, Open Source Expo Karlsruhe, W-JAX Munich).

First time I presented redView was at EclipseCon 2009 and it took much longer then expected to go public as Open Source project. Plug-ins and Sources will be available in november / december 2009 (promised !)

redView’s focus is to provide an easy way for developers of business applications to design UI, share this with customers and use it in RCP applications. redView contains a WYSIWYG editor with Drag’n'Drop and also Properties from Outline, an engine to dynamically render the models, distributed editiing of design changes and live-pushing into running RCP clients using CDO.

redView uses Riena Ridgets to separate UI and Control. redView provides localization of Labels, Enums and more. redView supports and uses Extension Points and Declarative Services. redView can bind to associations of abstract or super classes and embed different nested views depending from data type or even exclude composites depending on a visibility processor/descriptor.

redView can be used for prototyping or in real applications or to get a nice UI for web services. redView’s WYSIWYG editor is something like the “babelfish” between customer-requirements and developer-implementation.

redView can be integrated into a complete modeling workflow using openArchitectureWare (Eclipse Modeling MWE, Xpand, Xtend) and you’re able to generate a complete RCP application with Riena Navigation, LnF and UI from an UML or EMF model.

redView is customizable and supports EMF Model Extensions, so you can have your own Validators, Visibility Descriptors and more.

… and this is only the tip of the iceberg. stay tuned….

[helios] HowTo get CDO 3.0 to push View Modifications into running RCP Apps

Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) Milestone 2

Eclipse 3.6 (Helios) has reached the 2nd Milestone and this year the first time so early you can download SDK or EPP packages.

I tried downloading Helios M2 EPP Modeling Package for OSX cocoa 64-bit and got all the projects important to my modeling IDE:

• Xpand/Xtend 0.8.0
• Xtext 0.8.0
• MWE 0.8.0
• EMF 2.6.0
• and more
• but missing: CDO 3.0

Pushing Model Changes into running RCP Apps

Recently we integrated CDO into redView (Riena EMF Dynamic Views for Business Applications) which enables a live-pushing from redView WYSIWYG Editor into running RCP Applications.

Curious ? Here’s a short snapshot, where you see the redView Designer from inside Eclipse IDE and three running RCP Application besides this editor.

done

…you should switch HD ON…

The Business View Designer is designing the View using redView Editor:

• Drag’n'Drop of Elements
• Adding something new
• Undo Modifications etc.

After saving the View these changes are pushed to all running RCP Applications by magic.

Thats behind the magic:

All SWT Views are dynamically rendered by redView, the Views are EMF models, which itself are generated using openArchitectureWare (Xpand/Xtend, MWE) from an UML (Magicdraw) model.

All redView view models are stored into a CDO repository living on a server in another city. All changes are pushed from CDO over the Internet to all connected clients. Without the need of restarting the app or updating/refreshing bundles.

Isn’t this cool ?

(Before you ask: no, there’s currently no download of redView available – you have to wait until november, because we have to prepare a customer event before.)

HowTo install CDO 3.0

We need CDO 3.0 because there was a small problem: CDO scaled well for large models because of lazy loading, but failed loading a small “deep” model like a SWT view at once over the internet. Thanks to Eike Stepper now there’s a new fetching strategy available and it works great

An here’s the solution how to get CDO 3.0 into your Helios M2 installation until there’s a CDO – P2 updatesite online available again.

Please got to the CDO Build: https://build.eclipse.org/hudson/view/Modeling/job/cbi-emf-net4j-cdo-3.0/ and open the last successfull build:

then click on build/N2009….. and from the list select the emf-cdo-update, which is a downloadable P2 Update Site:

After downloading you can unzip and use this as a Local P2 Updatesite:

Now you can install CDO 3.0 and Net4J and finally your Helios M2 Modeling Installation looks like