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Re: [stellation-res] VSF Editor 
At 08:56 AM 12/5/2002, Jonathan Gossage wrote:

I was looking at the VSF editor last night and I was wondering whether it
might make sense to use the JDT Java editor as the starting point. There
seems to a lot of functionality in the Java Editor that we will need and
will have to implement for ourselves.


Hi Jonathan,

The JFace and JDT editors would probably be a great starting point -
there's a lot of good design and functionality there.  If I'd understood
the editor frameworks better when I started, the VSF editor concept demo
would look a lot different internally (so a rewrite is needed, no problem).
The next VSF editor rev (hopefully a solid tool rather than just a demo)
will use a _lot_ more of the Eclipse frameworks.

Several probably-obvious points:
* You should probably start by extending the JFace text editor.
   The JDT Java editor is built on top of the JFact text editor framework;
   the Java editor is a _lot_ more complicated.  For the VSF editor,
   I started with a basic JFace text editor, studied the JDT editor to see
   how the JFace edit framework actually worked, and then borrowed
   selected bits from the Java editor.

* Do a small pilot first; given the current state of Eclipse docs, that's the
  best way to get a feel for how the various interfaces and components
  fit together.

* Be aware that the names given to various Eclipse classes / interfaces
  are often misleading.  org.eclipse.jface.text.Position is a good example:
  I assumed it marked a point location within an editor buffer: it really
  specifies a span/range/subsequence of contiguous characters
  (since Positions have both offset and length).  A Position is very similar
  to an IMarker (which can also have a length); in fact, Positions are pretty
much the transient editor-buffer equivalents of IMarkers: Positions are updated 
  dynamically with every edit buffer change, while IMarkers are only updated
  when a MarkerUpdater is run, e.g. when the buffer contents are saved to the
  underlying document.  But I digress....
If you decide to go this route, I could write up more details on what I know about the editor frameworks, and would be interested in whatever you learn along the way. Time permitting, I'm hoping to do an article on the next rev of the VSF editor and how to leverage the text editor frameworks -- but I need to learn a fair bit more first! 

-----------------
On another topic -- re: the intenationalization work in general, I've been wondering if you can join forces with other Eclipse folks working in this area. A number of people outside Stellation are concerned about this area (e.g. Peter Manahan), and maybe you could 
get them involved somehow (or benefit from any work they may have done).
(Admittedly, I haven't looked into this, and am pretty ignorant about the whole topic -- 
I may be totally off base here).

Here is one possibly-relevant thread:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/platform-help-dev/msg00132.html

Regards,
Jim

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wright, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
*** http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: jwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx ------- Personal Email: jim.wright@xxxxxxx

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