e4 - First Milestone!
The first milestone of the e4 project has been released. There’s lots of cool stuff in there for you to check out, here is just a smattering:
- Modeled UI: The goal of this work is to make it easier to contribute parts (views, editors), to allow greater reuse of them in a wider variety of contexts, and to be able to assemble the parts together in new ways, allowing new “shapes” to the workbench (e.g. include or don’t include perspectives). This will be a boon in particular for RCP developers who want to make something other than an IDE.
- Skinning: You can now express many visual aspects such as font and color choices in the form of CSS style sheets. By externalizing these choices, components can be reused and assembled into significantly different looking applications. I will be writing more on this subject in future posts, including a walk-through on building an RCP application with CSS skinning.
- Contexts, Application Services, and Dependency Injection: One of the barriers to reuse of UI components is direct reference to global workbench. To provide cleaner component boundaries, access to this state in e4 is now via contexts which are injected into the constructors of the parts. For example, selection change notification outbound from the part is expressed through change of the selection value in the context. Similarly, workbench services such as progress will be provided via this mechanism.
- SWT/BE: SWT widgets cross compiled to Flex or Dojo, this is one important reuse element of Eclipse being able to move to the web. And, the technology is oh so cool.
Check it out, there’s builds, demos to run… it’s looking pretty real! And of course, get involved!
Posted February 11th, 2009 by Kevin McGuire in category: e4
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