Home » Modeling » GMF (Graphical Modeling Framework) » GMF, Graphiti or just GEF for a "Form Designer" tool ?
| GMF, Graphiti or just GEF for a "Form Designer" tool ? [message #1013880] |
Sun, 24 February 2013 15:32  |
 Vince Cadmus
Messages: 16
Registered: July 2012 |
Junior Member |
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Hi,
I think the question is quite the same as http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/m/381161/, but as it is a bit old, may be the answer has changed ?
So I need to write an eclipse plugin that is a sort of wysiwyg "Form Designer" : it edits/creates a model that defines some components with their position and dimension, some component being containers for the other ones (eg : the "form" component contains "text" and "input" components, etc). There is no logical connections between components (other than the parent/children one), and component positions must be stored within each component.
I already made a prototype with GEF, but I was wondering if GMF could save me some work for this kind of editor. It seems very powerful, but more dedicated to diagrams (component with connections), and some nice graphical tools ("arrange all" for instance) won't be very useful.
What do you think if the best way to develop this kind of plugin ?
Thanks ! 
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| Re: GMF, Graphiti or just GEF for a "Form Designer" tool ? [message #1014453 is a reply to message #1013880] |
Mon, 25 February 2013 21:19  |
Thomas Beyer
Messages: 55
Registered: February 2013 |
Member |
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Hi Vince,
GMF is indeed very extensive considering its provided functionality out of the box. You don't have to use connections, if you don't require to.
The generative approach and the ability to even customize the generation at almost every level/step within the transformation chain offers a very flexible development environment for graphical editors.
However, from my experiences, some concepts of GMF and its tooling seems quiet high-level at the beginning and the framework has grown very large.
The approach of Graphiti is at the moment propably the more lightweight one, but not GEF.
Since you are already experienced with GEF, GMF is just bridging the gap to EMF in a generative way (like a very very rich controller between gef - being the ui layer framework - and emf - being the persistence resp. data layer framework).
From what I understand, GMF Tooling is working on the support for reusing the GMF generation framework for Graphiti as well as for GMF.
So once you managed to operate the GMF generation, you will simply have the choice what to generate. Cool stuff, right?
As far as I am concerned, I would always choose the GMF-way, because there is hardly anything, that can't be done. True, the documentation seems a little "distributed", but the community is strong and a lot of problems have already been discussed, that you could leverage from.
Regards Thomas
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