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….

[galileo] target platform and ide: summary

This is the last part of my Galileo Reviews around Target Platforms. An Overview of this blog series can be found here.

Plug-ins inside IDE and Target Platform

If you followed my blogs then you know which of your Plug-ins (Bundles) belong to the IDE and wich to the Target Platform, where they come from and where they will be stored:

You also know which Eclipse Views can help you to control IDE Plug-ins:

…and also the Views to control the Plug-ins of your Target Platforms:

You can read in detail about this in these previous posts:

1. Cool Views to control Bundles (Plug-ins) defining your IDE
2. Cool Views to control Bundles (Plug-ins) defining a Target Platform

3rdParty Bundles of Target Platform from Directories

If you’re working with 3rdParty Bundles without Update Sites then you have to store these Bundles in Directories.

Your Target Definition file contains the path of these directories. We already have talked about storing Target definition files inside your workspace and to put them under Source Control (CVS, SVN, …) to make it easier to share them. But there’s another problem sharing these definitions if they contain pathes to your local target directory.

Here’s my tip how to solve this:

1. Go to Eclipse Preferences Run/Debug String Substitution and add a new Variable describing the Path to the Root directory of your Target Platform Directories:

2. Use the String Substitution Variable in your Target Platform Definition:

Now your Target Platform Definitions can easy be used on different computers and OS.

Galileo reviews will continue…

I hope my blogs about Target Platforms in Galileo are of any help to you defining Target Platforms or perhaps even to start using Target Platforms.

There will be some more Galileo Reviews around Plug-in Development (PDE). …stay tuned…

My life as Software Architect and Enterprise Application developer is not limited to RCP, OSGI, EJB … – to have real fun I’m working model-driven.

openArchitectureWare (oAW) projects (MWE, Xpand / Xtend, Xtext) were moved from openarchitectureware.org to eclipse.org and part of Galileo

Now I have to migrate my MDSD projects and the experiences and HowTo’s will be the topics of my next Galileo reviews.

New Ways Around Generation Gap Pattern – VideoCast

To demonstrate the use of VetoRedirectStrategy in oAW workflows (see my last blog entry “New Ways Around Generation Gap Pattern“) I created a videocast – movie.

After publishing my first videocasts I learned that there are sometimes problems to play them in different browsers. So I publish my screencasts in different formats – you can use what fits your environment.

• http://vimeo.com/ekkescorner as HD movie
• http://ekkes-corner-tv.org as QuickTime
• http://www.slideshare.net/ekkescorner as slides (no audio or animation)
• iTunes: as VideoCast for iPod/iPhone or AppleTV/desktop (To subscribe from iTunes Store search for „ekkes-corner“)

Have fun.

ekke