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 mode l 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….

from http://ekkescorner.wordpress.com