Eclipse Launches Visual Editor Project

Developers Get Open, Extensible User Interface Builder

Focuses on Supporting Popular GUI Frameworks including SWING and SWT

Schaumburg, IL—November 18, 2003—Today the Eclipse consortium announced establishment of the Visual Editor Project, a new effort to create and deliver an open visual GUI construction and editor platform. The project is dedicated to generically supporting any user interface framework and programming language supported by Eclipse, and will initially implement a reference GUI builder for the Java Swing/JFC and SWT graphical user interface frameworks.

Following the tradition established by the Eclipse C Development Tools and Java Development Tools projects, the Visual Editor Project works to deliver first-class reference development tools. The Visual Editor Project will establish an open, extensible API that enables commercial ventures and open-source projects to build new, innovative, and interesting offerings that go far beyond the capabilities envisioned by the projects' original designers.

“Just as the Visual Editor Project itself would not be possible without the infrastructure provided by the Java Development Tooling project and Graphical Editor Framework, we intend to enable developers to create new, exciting, and innovative technology that would not have been feasible without the infrastructure provided by the Visual Editor project,” said David Orme of Advanced Systems Concepts, leader of the Visual Editor Project.

Today, developers demand tools that give them effective choice in the frameworks they use. Projects will benefit from integrating GUI building capabilities that equally support SWING/JFC, SWT and other environments. With delivery of the Visual Editor reference distributions, Eclipse developers will no longer need to create graphical user interfaces by hand-coding Java source.

The organizers of the Visual Tools Project are responding to overwhelming demand from the Eclipse tools ecosystem by contributing resources including design expertise, source code and additional development resources. The release of the GUI builder code will enable developers that rely on open tools to experience the same kind of productivity they could obtain from current proprietary IDEs. At the same time it will create new opportunities for companies that are pressing the state-of-the art in modern IDEs.

The Visual Editor Project accepted IBM's visual editor for Java source code as the initial code contribution. This module provides a robust GUI builder for SWING user interfaces. One of the first tasks addressed by the project will be providing SWT support. Companies making contributions toward SWT support include Advanced Systems Concepts, IBM, Instantiations, and Red Hat.

More information can be obtained about the Eclipse Visual Editor project at http://www.Eclipse.org/vep, or from participating companies:

In addition, David Orme will be presenting a session that describes the Visual Editor Project at EclipseCon 2004 at Anaheim CA in February. “Join us in Anaheim to find out more about why the Visual Editor Project is important and exciting for the Eclipse community,” David added.

Full details of the Eclipse consortium, open-source community, the Eclipse Platform and royalty-free downloads are available at http://www.eclipse.org.

More information on EclipseCon 2004 is available at http://www.eclipsecon.org.

About Eclipse

Eclipse is an open source ecosystem of royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse-based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor supported environment. Eclipse delivers a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and use software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and sharing core integration technology, tool producers can concentrate on their areas of expertise and the creation of new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java™ language, and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux®, MacOS®, QNX® and Windows® based systems. Full details of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org.

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