Difference between revisions of "Incubator/Platform/UFacekit"

Revision as of 17:12, 6 September 2008

Introduction

UFacekit is a proposed open source component under the Eclipse Platform Incubator project. UFacekit's purpose is to:

• improve adoption of Eclipse Core technologies (like Eclipse-Databinding) outside RCP and SWT (e.g. Swing, GWT-Applications)
• improve usability of Eclipse-Databinding by providing a high-level Widget-API

Background

Since the 3.3 release Eclipse ships a top-notch databinding libary (Eclipse-Databinding) to easy development of UI-Application backed with a model. In time of 3.4 we saw adoption of Eclipse-Databinding in many RCP applications and new libraries supporting model implementations (EMF) beside JavaBeans(tm) but we didn't saw support for other Widget-Toolkit (like Swing, GWT, ...) although the main libary is designed to make this possible. This means that Eclipse-Databinding is not used in applications who are not using SWT and JFace although there's no good reason to do so.

UFacekit was started a year ago by James Strachan and Tom Schindl (Angelo Zerr and Kenneth Westelinck joined the project later) with the following set of targets:

• promote reuse of rich UI code across Eclipse (JFace/SWT), GWT and Swing runtimes by providing a facade around different UI-Technologies
• promote the use of JFace Data Binding within GWT and Swing communities by providing Eclipse-Databinding-Observable implementations for them
• simplify rich UI development by providing simpler facades and powerful binding

Scope

The objectives for an initial version of UFacekit are:

• a highlevel, widget-toolkit and model-indepent Widget API to easily bind widgets (including validation and decoration support)
  • UI
    • implementation for SWT/JFace
    • implementation for Swing
  • Model
    • JavaBeans
    • EObjects (EMF)
    • UBeans
• Observable implementations for Swing
• Observable implementations for UBean
• Observable implementations for XML-DOM
• org.eclipse.core.databinding for use in GWT applications based upon current stable Eclipse release
• Observable implementations for GWT-Widgets

Additional functionality considered for later versions of UFacekit:

• Support for Eclipse-Forms
• Support to define UI and UFacekit-Applications (Upplication) using EMF
• Support to design Upplications using GEF
• Support for other Java-UI-Toolkits (QT-Jambi, DOJO, ...)
• Declarative Styling

UFacekit Design

UFacekit is designed in a modular way as OSGi-Bundles to use its subcomponents without a minimal set of dependencies. A developer only wants to use Eclipse-Databinding in his/her project she will only use the Swing-Observables-Bundle, if he/she only wants to use a light weight model implementation he/she only takes the UBean-Bundles.

As already mentionned all UFacekit deliverables are packaged as OSGi-Bundles. By following the OSGi-standards it can be used with any OSGi implementation following the standards (Felix, Knopplerfish, ...).

The above design makes the UI-code from from the Toolkit-Code and holds as view informations about the modeling technology used.

An UBean-Example:

public void createUI(UIComposite root, UBeanForm form, IObservableValue value) {
  UIFactory ui = root.getFactory();
 
  // The UI setup
  InputFieldUIInfo uiInfo = = new InputFieldUIInfo(GridLayoutData.fillHorizontalData(),InputFieldUIInfo.SIMPLE);
  UIInputField idField = ui.newInputField(detailComposite, uiInfo);
 
  // The Binding setup
  InputFieldBindingInfo bindingInfo = InputFieldBindingInfo.newTextFieldInfo(form.detailValue(Person.ID, int.class));
  form.add(idField, bindingInfo);
 
  // Bind the master value
  form.bind(value);
}

An EMF-Example:

public void createUI(UIComposite root, EMFForm form, IObservableValue value) {
  UIFactory ui = root.getFactory();
 
  // The UI setup
  InputFieldUIInfo uiInfo = = new InputFieldUIInfo(GridLayoutData.fillHorizontalData(),InputFieldUIInfo.SIMPLE);
  UIInputField idField = ui.newInputField(detailComposite, uiInfo);
 
  // The Binding setup
  InputFieldBindingInfo bindingInfo = InputFieldBindingInfo.newTextFieldInfo(form.detailValue(PersonPackage.Literals.PERSON__ID, int.class));
  form.add(idField, bindingInfo);
 
  // Bind the master value
  form.bind(value);
}

Examples

Those Screenshots are made up with 100% the same code base the only thing different is the initial composite (the Shell used as a root) created.

SWT/JFace

Swing

MyGWT (ancient and has to be rewritten)

Relationship with other Eclipse-based Projects

UFacekit has a strong relation to the following projects:

• Eclipse-Databinding (Core & JFace) providing the foundation for the high-level API
• EMF

Organization

Initial Committers

• Tom Schindl - tom.schindl@bestsolution.at
• James Strachan
• Angelo Zerr
• Kenneth Westelinck

Initial Code Contribution

UFacekit-Project

Interested Parties

Tentative Plan

Q4 - 2008: A first not feature complete release

Q1 - 2009: First public release