Thomas,
What you'd need to do is propose a project to contain this work and build a community around it. Note that there are already several projects/frameworks at Eclipse that provide similar facilities... Sapphire [1], EEF [2] and Scout [3].
PDE editor was written well before any of these frameworks existed. You may find that re-basing the new PDT editor on one of the existing frameworks to be cheaper in the long term than creating and maintaining a new framework.
Thanks,
- Konstantin
[1] https://www.eclipse.org/sapphire/
[2] https://eclipse.org/modeling/emft/?project=eef
[3] https://eclipse.org/scout/
From: Thomas Gossmann
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2015 2:55 AM
To: ide-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ide-dev] Widget and Utils contribution
Hey guys,
I'm the developer of the composer plugin (which is a php package
manager) and we are about to migrate this plugin into PDT. We have some
dependencies to solve and here is one which has a nice contribution to
eclipse as well. I hope I am on the correct mailing list here, anyway
please pass me on.
1) History:
The main part of the composer plugin is the composer editor, which is
pretty similar to the PDE editor. In fact, I even took code from there.
I realized this code can be used for multiple purposes, editors and
dialogs as well, because it was already very generalized. I extracted it
into its own plugin, which I put on github:
https://github.com/gossi/eclipse-components
2) Packages:
The repo consists a little more than just UI stuff. So let me explain a
little which packages to look at:
- si.gos.eclipse.actions
- si.gos.eclipse.editor
- si.gos.eclipse.forms
- si.gos.eclipse.parts
- si.gos.eclipse.widgets.utils
basicaly they all work together.
3) Features:
- The most interessting is the parts package I'd say. There you'll find
typical parts that you see throughout the whole eclipse environment.
Most typically, this is a list/table/tree on the left, with action
buttons on the right. There are just multiple parts present with all
their configuration classes (Taken from PDE).
- Forms: Offer many widgets to build up forms (e.g. in an editor) very
easily (Taken from PDE).
- Editor: Offer customized sections as widgets that are ready to use in
a (multipage) editor (Taken from PDE).
- Widget Utils: Especially the parts might occur in an editor
environment or most often appear in dialogs. Depending on which
situation, they need to be initiated differently, that's where the
WidgetFactory comes into play, which is a facade pattern to adopt to
these two environments and are used under the hood of the parts above.
- Widget Helper: An easy way to help layouting composites in SWT (Taken
from PDE).
4) The Plan:
We want to use this for PDT and to migrate the composer plugin, yet I
think a lot of people will benefit from that and the best would be to
contribute this to a place somewhere in eclipse where it can reach its
potential.
=> That's my question to you guys:
I'd like to contribute this back to eclipse. What do you think?
In case you agree on this, there is some stuff to do (which you might be
asking for anyway):
For now and for historical reasons, everything is e3 based, which can be
done way more easier with e4 and DI. Prior to contribution to eclipse,
I'd lift the code up onto e4 API.
gossi
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