E4 Feedback Contest

Its really exciting to witness how eclipse maturing every year and providing wider set of tools. Eclipse API helped me to build tools for heterogeneous domains from Database, BPM , Rule Engine, Mashup to Service Component Archoitecture.

The e4 has introduced the "JavaScript framework" to demonstrate the flexibility of e4 language support. In the meantime, this e4 component makes the Eclipse much similar to the internet browser(like FF,Chrome,IE...). Yeah, it can be imagined that we get a heavy but high-performance internet client. The GEF/GEF3D with Javascript should beat mainstream Javascript libraries easily. Cool...Oh, it is a little unfair to compare the C/S structure to B/S...

After some recent job interviews and ecmascript 5 specification(final draft) reading, I have the breathing time in this weekend to come back to our Eclipse community. I find that there is one trend for me to do a lengthy blogging. One reason for this is that I'd like to discuss the useful, not trivial technical aspects of Eclipse evolvement in our community at least. However, this need a long time to prepare the contents usually in the span of one week or more. Maybe I can break one lengthy blog article into more short ones to make my life easier?:)

In the E4 webseminar I learned about the E4 UI editor which allow you to change the user interface on the fly. As you most likely know the Eclipse UI is modelled as an Eclipse EMF model. This model can be changed during directly in Eclipse via the editor or via the EMF API (I have not yet tested this) and the UI will change immeadiately according to the change.

As said in the title, e4 0.9 tech preview is out… What is it? Ok, if you’re not totally Eclipse addictive (like me ^^), maybe you never heard of it. So e4 stands for Eclipse 4. It means that there is a major modification of the Eclipse Platform. 0.9 tech preview means that it is an official version for preview of what such wonderful things it will provides. You want a quick overview of some of these new things? Ok, let’s go :)

The first day I saw Eclipse e4 (next generation of the Eclipse platform), I was immediately stunned by the splash screen that I got instead of the splash screen before.

Eclipse E4 allows to style your applications via css like stylesheets. The following gives a short example how to get started with css stylecheets. Create a new E4 product “de.vogella.e4.css” similar to the description Your first Eclipse E4 application. Of course you can also copy “de.vogella.e4.first” and edit the package, Application.xmi and the product to fit the new project “de.vogella.e4.css” or just extend “de.vogella.e4.first” with the usage of stylesheets.

When I saw that e4 is on the road I was curious to try it. As usual not all went easily. Firstly, I've download a kit and unzipped. While unzipping I got error about the length of some class it means that standard Zip could not unzip file which the header length longer that 250 characters. Without further ado, I used 7 zip. It solved the problem mentioned above.

When I saw that e4 is on the road I was curious to try it. As usual not all went easily. Firstly, I've download a kit and unzipped. While unzipping I got error about the length of some class it means that standard Zip could not unzip file which the header length longer that 250 characters. Without further ado, I used 7 zip. It solved the problem mentioned above.

E4 is the next generation of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and brings numerous improvements in a bid to stay relevant as a platform. In this post, I’ll first summarize what I have already written on E4 and then make several suggestions as to where I think E4 should be heading. It is an extended version of a comment I added to the artice “Eclipse has a future” which explains what E4 is and how it improves on prior versions. The author finishes with the sentence “I really am psyched!” (regarding Eclipse’s future). I share that excitement, especially after I found out that Eclipse is looking at all kinds of technologies (RAP, Flex, Dojo) for web-enablement.

Eclipse released on the 29 July 2009 the tech preview version 0.9 of Eclipse E4, which can be downloaded here. I wasn’t able to find a description how to create an new application based on E4. Starting from the CVS example is possible but I wanted to start from scratch. After several failed attempts to create an E4 application I believe I have found a way to create an E4 application. I assume others will have similar problems so I wanted to share my experience.