[platform-dev] FlexBuilder GUI designer: how did they do it?

[sarikan <serefarikan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, 
I've been taking a look at the FlexBuilder development environment from
Adobe, and I have found the visual designer quite interesting. I know that
not all members of the list may be aware of this tool, but I would really
appreciate your comments about how they may have implemented this tool. I
would not expect detailed comments of course, but I'd like to hear your
conceptual answers. Given the capabilities of Eclipse platform, how
would/could you implement the following functionality.
The designer lets you drag and drop gui components from a view to the editor
area, which contains a design canvas. Looking at the way the dragged
components are rendered, it appears the designer area is a flash player
actually. It is simply rendering the flash components in design mode. What I
am curious is, how did they integrate this into SWT based editor of Eclipse?
The editor seems to be a drop target. 
The only way I can think of is to put an ActiveX wrapper in a SWT container,
and manage the ActiveX based flash component. How would you communicate to a
component in ActiveX component in this case? The right click context menus
on components in designer are apperantly SWT. So this would be a SWT,
ActiveX component integration.
Can you think of another method to do this? The fact that the gui designer
is only available in Windows and Mac OsX makes me feel that this is the way
they made it. 

Your comments would be appreciated a lot.

Best Regards
Seref
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