Update to “Understanding Layouts in SWT”
I’ve been hacking over the last couple of days on an update to the Understanding Layouts in SWT (the original is here). I’ve had my eye on updating this article for a while, but have been skittish about tackling it because of all the screenshots. Bug 221251 forced me to look at it, and then one thing lead to another, and, well… I wasn’t planning to do anything this past weekend anyway…
To save time and make it easier to rebuild the screenshots if I ever need to, I’ve created a plug-in project that can regenerate them. I intend to put the project somewhere so that it can be shared and used by others (but need to figure out where).
The article was originally authored by Carolyn MacLeod and then updated (for Eclipse 2.0) by Shantha Ramachandran.
So far, I’ve only updated the style of the document to benefit from the new template (and removed all that icky MS-Word markup using a bevy of regular expressions), redid the screenshots and reworked some parts of the format and text. I figure that a full update needs to consider StackLayout and TextLayout, so I plan on spending a few hours working that in later in the week.
In the meantime, if you see anything wrong with the new version, I’d like to hear about it. Add your comments to Bug 221251 (or you can attach them here, but the bug would be a better place).
May 27th, 2008 at 12:19 am
Wayne, it might be a good addition to this article to talk about visual designers. I believe SWT Designer from Instantiations is available to Eclipse committers for free and it is really amazing tool. For example, I’ve created Maven POM editor screen mockups [1] for m2e project [2] completely in SWT Designer.
[1] http://docs.codehaus.org/display/M2ECLIPSE/Maven+POM+editor
[2] http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/m2e/
May 27th, 2008 at 7:42 am
Hi Wayne,
Is it possible to get a pdf version of the article, i think Openoffice allows you to export as pdf file->export as pdf i believe.
Thanks
May 27th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Mohamed, as a general rule, we do not provide PDF versions. You can, however, create it yourself. The “Printable version” link in the top right corner produces a version without all the extra stuff.