XWT - Declarative UI designed for Eclipse
Introduction
With today’s Eclipse 3.x stream, UI development uses still direct programming mode: UI controls and event handling are directly created in Java. This solution presents several drawbacks:
- High technology pre-requisite as UI developer
- Difficult to separate UI appearance and business logic
- Poor reusability
- Limitation of the dynamic UI support
- Very hard to integrate with develop tools
A new UI programming paradigm is widely used in Web Application development: Declarative UI. In fact, this approach is perfectly applicable in Desktop Applications such as Eclipse RCP. This is what Microsoft does in .NET 3 with XAML. NetBeans provides also a similar solution with Matisse. Fortunately, in e4, Declarative UI becomes a important work area.
The purpose of our project XWT (EPL license) is to provide a foundation framework to resolve above problems. Some of them can be resolved directly, and some of them needs a tool built on top of this framework such Visual Editor, Modeling tool.
XWT should address three kinds of developer directly or indirectly:
SWT Developer
SWT Developer, with a deep knowledge on UI technology (such as SWT/JFace, JFace databindng, PDE, etc), needs a ”’component-based”’ framework to develop reusable UI Components for Domain UI Designer.
UI designer
UI Designer, as a domain application developer, focuses on building domain application using UI Components provided by SWT Developer. The knowledge on SWT/JFace is not necessary.
Model designer
Model Designer is a domain application developer using MDA tools. The UI generation via Template engine is key requirement from the business model.
Essential features
The following features are critical for a Declarative UI framework:
- Extensibility - Dynamic mapping with UI technology library such as SWT/Jface
- Component approach to guarantee the reusability
- Support of Data Binding
- Support of the MDA tools
Try out
A POC is available via Eclipse update manager: http://www.soyatec.org/update/xwt. After the installation, you can check out some samples and a demo with EMF model + Nebula via our SVN server: http://www.soyatec.org/xwt.
Your feedback is welcome.
Posted November 28th, 2008 by Yves YANG in category: Declarative UI
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Charles Says:
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:36 am
There is already an ‘XWT’ project in existence:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xwt
http://www.xwt.org/