Have anybody used Eclipse XWT in non-trivial (e.g. something more complex then tutorial) environment? I don't think Eclipse4 uses it by itself.
Does it really have any advantages over SWT?
XWT is a declarative UI framework. It allows you to model your UI. You don't need to write code to instantiate, design, layout and data-bind your SWT widgets. Instead a XML based description file is used to build the UI.
Take a look at the example from the XWT FAQ: http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/XWT#Layout
XWT resembles GladeXML, XAML and XUL. There is tooling support in Eclipse Juno with the XWT Editor and WindowBuilder.
In my opinion the tooling support is lacking, several features of XWT are missing from the editors. While I generally prefer the declarative UI approach, I wouldn't base a non-trivial project on XWT alone.
Apparently, no one have seen XWT in production env.
Related
First of all, I have seen many links on stackoverflow of integrating XText with GMF.
The most consistent tutorial I've seen so far was: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/mv/msg/472225/1036564/#msg_1036564
..But not even generate a textual editor in the final step (only GMF editor).
I also saw the documentation, but I can not understand what they suggest in this link: http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/documentation.html#gmf_integration
So I wonder if anyone knows how to integrate effectively the GMF with Xtext with an existing ecore! Use the XText 2.0.4.
Thank you!
Depending on how fixed you are on using GMF, you may want to look at Graphiti (built on GEF).
Graphiti is an Eclipse-based graphics framework that enables rapid development of state-of-the-art diagram editors for domain models. Graphiti can use EMF-based domain models very easily but can deal with any Java-based objects on the domain side as well.
There is an Eclipse Labs project for creation of Graphiti editors using an XText DSL, called Spray.
This project aims to provide one or more Domain Specific Languages (DSL) to describe Visual DSL Editors against the Graphiti runtime, and provide code generation to create the boilerplate code for realizing the implementation against the Graphiti framework. Potentially the Spray DSL can be used to generate code for other frameworks as well.
You can import your DSL ecore model into Spray, and using references to your DSL's types create a graphical editor with relatively little boilerplate. The presentation at CodeGen 2012 (SprayCodeGeneration2012.pdf on the Google Code link above) highlights some of Spray's features.
I already tried a few tool for eclipse which are for building UMLs (Object/Dependency Diagrams), but what I really need is a tool to generate such an UML out of code. (and not vice versa)
I'd prefer a simple UML tools which is easy to install and don't has any dependencies. I already tried Jupe, Omondo and eUML, but anyhow I'm still not really happy with them.
(I also found this: Eclipse UML plugin with Java Code Generation)
Try the most common CASE tools like MagicDraw or Enterprise Architect.
They have reverse engineering capabilities and they are most powerful (especially auto formatting the diagram elements may be useful).
If you want / need to stay inside Eclipse, have a look at this topic which is very similar to your question.
I have been working on a project model and pretty much completed it. Now I must implement the view of the project. I like eclipse view layout very much and tried to implement like this but I couln't. And then download source code of eclipse but couldn't find my specific code snippet in all of the source code. I mean I want to take basic layout implementation like eclipse Coolbar,ctabfolder and events. any suggections ?
Thanks.
If you like the Eclipse look and feel and the components used, you should have a look into the technologies used with Eclipse:
SWT is the GUI toolkit. It differs from Swing in that it uses the native widgets, if possible. This makes an application using it behave more like a native application than Swing does, which has its own set of components. You will find the raw components that you mention here.
JFace is an application framework based on SWT. It provides higher level conceptual components.
Eclipse RCP is a platform for building application. It takes away some common tasks of application building but, of course, you need to learn the concepts first.
Swing has similar components, but does not use the native widgets. It draws them itself. In my opinion Swing is easier to learn and to use but the results of SWT are often nicer - you can often "feel" that a Swing application behaves not completely right. It is better if Swing applications do not try to mimic the native look and feel to avoid the uncanny valley effect. So expect your resulting application to look and feel different.
There are more documentation and third-party libraries available for Swing, for example the very nice Netbeans RCP that let's you easily build applications.
What you are looking for is a docking framework. What the best framework is is open for debate.
You might have a look at this question for a list of popular frameworks
What is a difference between an IDE and Framework with respect to Java?
Basically :
The IDE is the software you use to develop ; for example, Eclipse is an IDE (code editor, debugger, build tools ... )
The Framework is a set of both libraries and best practices that help you not re-invent the wheel, and provide a set of guidelines on how to develop.
Quoting wikipedia, an IDE :
is a software application that
provides comprehensive facilities to
computer programmers for software
development. An IDE normally consists
of:
a source code editor
a compiler and/or an interpreter
build automation tools
a debugger
While a Framework :
is an abstraction in which common code
providing generic functionality can be
selectively overridden or specialized
by user code, thus providing specific
functionality. Frameworks are a
special case of software libraries in
that they are reusable abstractions of
code wrapped in a well-defined
Application programming interface
(API), yet they contain some key
distinguishing features that separate
them from normal libraries.
An IDE is an application used to write and compile code. A framework is generally a software component that someone else wrote that you can use/integrate into your own project, generally to avoid re-inventing the wheel.
A framework is a tool that is closely attached to the language you are using and usually extends upon or adds the the language features.
An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) provides automation support for the language you use with regards to syntax highlighting of keywords, errors, building projects, cleaning them, intgegration with VCS, etc. and usually provides default support for popular frameworks used for your language.
Java makes use of frameworks like Hibernate, Struts and Spring to extend the language and NetBeans or Intellij IDEA bring support for these tools to your Java project in a structured manor.
As per all answers I can come to a conclusion that Visual Studio is an IDE and .NET is a framework.
And also a framework(list of .dll) can be integrated into an IDE. Mean framework is a part of an IDE.
I am looking to create an editor and I was wondering if there was a Swing library which Eclipse uses for its main editor. It may be something quite basic, but I am looking for the drop down menus which come when you press full stop. Strings become symbols rather than just text.
Eclipse is rather SWT-based than Swing-based.
As for a custom editor, you could look into an eclipse-GMF-EMF-based editor with XText
Xtext is a framework for development of textual domain specific languages (DSLs).
Just describe your very own DSL using Xtext's simple EBNF grammar language and the generator will create a parser, an AST-meta model (implemented in EMF) as well as a full-featured Eclipse text editor from that.
alt text http://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/images/screenshot-title.png
The Framework integrates with technology from Eclipse Modeling such as EMF, GMF, M2T and parts of EMFT.
Development with Xtext is optimized for short turn-arounds, so that adding new features to an existing DSL is a matter of minutes. Still sophisticated programming languages can be implemented.
Actually I think you want to consider developing an Eclipse RCP application which involves using SWT, JFace and other parts of the Eclipse platform. There are many layers of editor support which are in the Platform Text component, this is what the Eclipse JDT editors are based on. The modelling stuff (GMF, EMF, etc) is probably much more than what you want. The AbstractTextEditor class in org.eclipse.ui.texteditor is a good place to start. RCP gets you a lot of other stuff as far as helping you to manage the objects you are editing, but you don't necessarily need to use this.
There are likely Eclipse corner (on eclipse.org) articles on how to do this, but the specific one escapes me now. I always just look at the code.