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Re: [platform-core-dev] eclipse as a general application framework

Hi Shaohua,

The extent of the work depends on your goal.  If you wish to use the UI as
a general application framework, I expect the following changes are
required:

- pull out the resources plugin, vcm plugins (model and ui), jdt plugin
(model and ui), etc.  These are all simply plugins, so it would be very
easy to remove them from the platform.  The resulting platform might be
composed of the following plugins:

org.apache.xerces
org.eclipse.core.boot
org.eclipse.core.runtime
org.eclipse.core.target
org.eclipse.help.*
org.eclipse.sdk
org.eclipse.swt
org.eclipse.ui.

This would take about 10 minutes of deletion.

- The org.eclipse.ui plugin will contain errors wherever a reference to the
org.eclipse.core.resources plugin is made.  You will have to fix these
errors.  As a first crack, I would split the plugin into two parts: the
workbench itself, then standard components + resource layer.  Together,
these plugins would provide the behavior of the current resource centric
workbench. The workbench layer itself could be used as the basis for a new
non-resource specific platform.

For a person familiar with the code, this might take 1 to 2 weeks.  For the
most part, there are very few references to IResources in the
org.eclipse.ui, but it may be difficult to abstract out those that exist.
However, I think it's possible with some creativity.  Our primary goal with
any work is backwards compatability with the existing API's.  In other
words, a plugin wrote for version 1.0 of Eclipse should continue to work,
even after the abstraction has been performed.

If you wish to reuse the UI components within org.eclipse.ui in a more
generic way, as a series of parts which can be combined in various ways,
substantial effort is required.  The classes for part layout, perspectives,
etc, are not intended for public consumption, so it would require much
thought to clean them up, make the API's consistent, etc.

If you are interested in doing the UI work, the best place to float a
proposal is in platform-ui-dev.

Dave




                                                                                                                 
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                    platform-core-dev-admin@e        Subject:     [platform-core-dev] eclipse as a general       
                    clipse.org                       application framework                                       
                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                 
                    12/04/01 10:31 PM                                                                            
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                    platform-core-dev                                                                            
                                                                                                                 
                                                                                                                 



Hi,

I asked the same question in the news group and was advised to direct the
question to the mailing list. So here it goes.

What I am thinking for is the possibility of using the eclipse as a general
application framework. In particular, I am looking for a feature that does
not tie the data model with the local file system. For example, say I have
a domain model that's been stored in a database. I want to retrieve the
information from the database, turn them into objects, and present to the
user, either for viewing or editing purpose. The object model has similar
Project and Folder concepts, but the File does not map to the object
nicely. In addition, when objects (folder or file) is introduced into a
project, the current implementation stores this relationship into the local
file system (.meta folder)(???), which is not desirable.

My question is, how to deal with this situation? I understand eclipse is
not design for this purpose, but is it possible to extend the current
framework to cover the situation? Ok, it's possible. How easy is it? I
really like the whole thing and I am willing to spend time on it to make it
work, if it's not too hard. If doable, where should I start?

Your help is much appreciated.

shaohua


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