Re: [e4-dev] What about E4 Editor?

[Wim Jongman <wim.jongman@xxxxxxxxx>]

I must play with E4 editor development. Doc is important but I think tooling is important too. It should be cool if we can have PDE templates like : 

* Plug-in with an E4 editor.

* Plug-in with an E4 view.

...

We have that. If you install the e4 tooling you can create an e4 application with a view. An editor just implements the @dirtyable annotation. 

 

I tell me if JDT, WTP etc have the intention to migrate to pure E4 API?

With 3.x, we have base class EditorPart and IDE provides TextEditor which extends EditorPart. After that a lot of Plug'In can extends TextEditor like JDT with JavaEditor, WTP with StructuredTextEditor, etc..

With 4.x, if I understand, the idea is to use annotation and not base class. If we have not base class, it means that each Plug-in will implement TextEditor-like? Or perhaps the idea is just to provide a TextEditor (a simple Pojo)?

Obviously, we want to write TextEditor only once. Naturally you want to reuse this implementation. 

However, in pure Eclipse 4, we do not use the org.eclipse.ui bundle. EditorPart sits in the heart of org.eclipse.ui so there is a little problem. 

You have to pull in the compatibility layer until the complete editing framework has been rewritten to use pure Eclipse 4. I don't think that this will happen in the near future. AFAIK no one is working on this at the moment and frankly you can just forget that everyone will convert to pure E4. Having a solid CompatLayer and a solid "mixed-mode" solution is therefore the only way to reuse all the existing stuff.

So if you want to include your TextEditor based editor in your RCP on top of pure E4 code then you will be committed to use the "mixed-mode" scenario. Parts of your code uses the old framework and parts use the new DI based framework. There is nothing wrong in that. The Eclipse IDE does this as well. In Luna M1 the platform team have just reached a major milestone to allow the definition of an E4 view inside a CompatLayer Eclipse [1]

If your editor just depends on EditorPart then there is a different story because EditorPart can be quite easily rewritten to pure Eclipse 4. However, since pure Eclipse 4 does not work with the *Advisor classes any more, saving and restoring state is up to you until the time the e4 project provides something generic.

Best regards,

Wim

[1]  http://industrial-tsi-wim.blogspot.nl/2013/08/a-giant-leap-for-eclipse-rcp.html

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