Projects

rcp-company-uibindings

This project is about how the user interface programming of bigger enterprise projects in Eclipse RCP can be made easier. Eclipse RCP includes a large number of technologies that can be useful in an application and provide a good, rich user experience. Some of the more important technologies are ... [More] EMF, data binding, UI Forms, control decoration and field assist. But using these technologies out of the box, usually means you have to do a lot of boiler plate code for each widget - in itself not difficult, but a nightmare to maintain afterwards. This project is about how you can cut down on the boiler plate code and yet maintain full control of you application in Java. Tonny Madsen from The RCP Company will be doing a talk at EclipseCon '09, "The Happy Marriage of EMF, Data binding, UI Forms and Field Assist in larger RCP Applications", about this project. BackgroundImagine you have to develop a larger Eclipse RCP based application with many dozens - maybe hundreds - of views, dialogs and wizards all based on a large common EMF based data model. How do you make sure you get a consistent and modern interface that can be extended in the future without redesigning everything again and again? Basically, how do you solve these common problems: all currencies, amounts, dates, customer IDs and whatever are shown in the same manner all over the application all date fields support the same set of shortcuts for "today", "next week", "next weekend", etc. all enumeration fields of the same base type are mapped in the same manner - whether a combobox, list or simple text field is wanted in a specific form all forms use the same colors, fonts and images the application can still be developed using both automated UI generation and existing commercial tools when new UI ideas are developed they can be added to the application without having to redo all forms again the UI can utilize the current UI Forms, EMF validators, and field assist without having to hand code everything repeatably the developed code does not contain too much boilerplate code for the UI This project describes one possible solution to these problems based on a combination of the existing data binding toolkit, field assist framework and custom decoration of widgets. The configuration of the solution is based on a relatively simple extension point as well as annotations in the EMF model. Using the Plug-insYou are more than welcome to use the plug-ins of the project. After all, this is why it has been put up here. Just check it out. If you need another distribution format, please let us know. But we also encourage everybody to review the code, report issue and/or provide patches for the current implementation. If needed, send mail to The RCP Company to become an administrator... DependenciesYou also need the com.rcpcompany.utils.logging plug-in. See the The RCP Company Utilities for more information on how to get it. This siteThis site is intended to be a low-budget site. There will not be a lot of activity and/or documentation unless you help with it. Related Projects The RCP Company Utilities. [Less]