Hi all. I'm on a mini-campaign to try to make it easier for newbies to
get started developing stand-alone JFace apps. To that end, I have
updated the JFace Wiki "Using JFace outside the Eclipse platform"
section (http://wiki.eclipse.org/JFace) to include detailed step-by-step
instructions for setting up a project to supply the required JARs for
SWT and JFace.
After doing this, it occurred to me that a better idea would be to
create a zip file that contains a "org.eclipse.jface" project, similar
to the "org.eclipse.swt" project that gets created when you import from
the SWT zip file download.
I tried this and it is easy to make and appears to work. I created a
local project, made local copies of the 5 JARs (including
org.eclipse.ui.workbench.jar, which has some handy JFace-derived
dialogs); made a local copy of the JFace src.zip and attached to the
JFace JAR; fixed the Order and Export; and exported to a zip file.
With this, the setup for a new user to get started with SWT and JFace is
very easy -- just download the two zip files, import the two projects,
and then make your project depend on these two projects.
Maintaining the JFace zip would be easier than the SWT zip, since the
JFace JAR is platform independent (I believe). We just need one for each
major Eclipse version (I believe).
So, my questions are: (1) Do others agree that this would be a simpler
and better way to help people get started with stand-alone JFace
development? (2) If so, does it make sense to put this file on the
Eclipse website? Where? (It's about 6 mb.)
Any thoughts on this will be appreciated. Thanks. Mark