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Re: [eclipse-incubator-e4-dev] EMF based dynamic declarative UI

Olivier,

Olivier Moises wrote:

Finally, I found that EMF brings much more advantages than XML.

I agree, but there is still one important disadvantage: You must model the complete domain, i.e. GUI API, which is usually fairly large. One possibility is to allow a generic Widget concept, with the name as an attribute, and generic Property (name and value) objects attached to it, and use a factory/renderer that finds the specific class and properties. So, if the metamodel lacks a specific widget, you use the generic one instead.

Stylesheets
I am not sure to need more than that like cascading effects,
> this question is still open.

It would be interesting to make an EMF stylesheet mechanism, that is used for filling in defaults. So instead of styling the final GUI, you style the model and then build the GUI. The model could include some generic style-oriented attributes, like class, style and role, that may be used in selectors.

Generating the model from a java API :
Do you mean, generating the EMF GUI from an existing application (domain objects ...).

No, I meant build the metamodel from the toolkit's API, so you get more complete coverage of the features in the underlying toolkit.

Hallvard


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