E4 Webinars

e4 is the community effort for defining the next generation of the Eclipse platform. The aim is to simplify the Eclipse programming model, widen the applicability of the platform to areas like RCP and the web and broaden the participation from the community. We will provide a brief review of e4 goals and project structure. The status of each component area will be covered by the component presentations to follow.

Eclipse Application Services, also known as "the twenty things", is a set of core services that are sufficient to build well integrated components - things that most Eclipse plug-ins would make use of. The goal is to reduce bloat and simplify understanding by focusing on a smaller subset of services and APIs. Rather than the singleton accessors of the past, consumers receive services through dependency injection. Offering services as separate, independent APIs allows clients to make use of some of them without having to buy into all of them. This makes components more independent of the context in which they are used, and even enables web UI components using HTML and JavaScript to be used as first-class Eclipse components.

The e4 User Interface is a modeled application. This means that all graphical elements you see in the screen are rendered from a model that contains the description of each element. You will see that changes in the model are immediately reflected on running applications, enabling a great deal of power to implement UI managing strategies.

Style your Eclipse based apps using CSS! We will show how you can make your application look slicker through the use of externalized styling declared in standard CSS. We will also discuss how CSS, combined with the modelled UI work, results in a better separation of UI assembly, look and behaviour.

Eclipse XML Windowing Toolkit (XWT) allows you to create UI components based on a declarative style. You don't have to hand-code your UI anymore - you just describe the UI via XML code and it will then get generated. This allows you to separate the design and structure of your UI from the specific implementation details. This section will dicuss the architecture of XWT, how to get started with XWT and data binding.

e4 is the community effort for defining the next generation of the Eclipse platform. The aim is to simplify the Eclipse programming model, widen the applicability of the platform to areas like RCP and the web and broaden the participation from the community. We will provide a brief review of e4 goals and project structure. The status of each component area will be covered by the component presentations to follow.

This demonstration will review the e4 Core Resource changes for the user, including Groups, Portable Linked Resources, Resource Filters, and Navigator improvements. With these improvements, the user will be able to create flexible project file structures in Eclipse.

In order to add the 'clipse' after the 'E' we'll have to be able to support existing Wclipse plug-ins. In order to provide this ability without affecting e4's core implementation, we're providing an optional feature (the 'Compatibility Layer') that can host legacy Eclipse plug-ins within the e4 environment. Not only must it host the legacy plug-in's components correctly within e4, the challenge is to do this while allowing the existing UI elements (Views/Editors...) to work in situations unavailable in the current eclipse. How about the 'Project Explorer' used in an open resource dialog or a Java editor hosted in a page of the New Class wizard?

For more information on the Compatibility Layer go to: http://wiki.eclipse.org/E4/Compatibility.

One of the three main principles of e4 is to enable the platform for use on emerging web-based runtime technologies. This will ensure the platform remains a compelling and viable application framework in a rapidly changing web technology landscape, and it will allow e4-based applications to leverage web technologies, while remaining insulated from specific technology choices that may quickly become obsolete. Integration with the Rich AJAX Platform (RAP), an Eclipse runtime project, addresses this challenge.

The Toolkit Model is an EMF model of the User Interface (UI) components (or widgets) found in toolkits like Swing and SWT. The model includes concepts like Composite, TabFolder, Text, and Layout that define the structure and content of a UI. An instance of the Toolkit Model represents all or part of a specific UI, like an application window or form, but is not itself a runnable/running UI. Instead, a concrete UI in a specific toolkit is built and bound to the TM instance, to create a running user interface.