[lepido-dev] [Fwd: Re: Multipage Editors for Eclipse plugin]

[Ross Gardler <rgardler@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Forwarded from the Apache Forrest dev list for information only:

-------- Original Message --------
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:56:27 +0100
From: Ross Gardler <rgardler@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Multipage Editors for Eclipse plugin

Anil Ramnanan wrote:
> I am continuing work on the Eclipse plugin and I would like to convert 
> the current editors to multipage editors. Basically, a multpage editor 
> will contain two (or more)  views. My idea is to have a view for the 
> source code as well as a view for the tree view/content outline. The 
> advantage of a multipage editor is that it make it easier to implement 
> features such as links to Eclipse's built in property editor. Also, the 
> current editor can only open a file located in a specific location e.g 
> the site.xml file has to be in src/documentation/content/xdocs. If the 
> location of this file were to move in the future then the current editor 
> would not be bale to see the file. Anyy comments on this ?

+1

I was going to do the very same thing if/when I found the time.

I would recommend that you take a look at the Lepido project [1]. They
have a cool tool called Axe.

"The use of AXE allows to very quickly develop new editors by providing
a declarative approach to building form-oriented editors without
requiring an intimate knowledge of JFace, and by associating form
widgets to XPath expressions in the XML document, thus making it easy to
bidirectionally bind forms to the target source file.

The AXE component has been proposed for inclusion as a new WTP component
and according the the latest WTP PMC report will be eventually included
in WTP 1.1. In the meantime AXE will reside in the Lepido project before
moving to the org.eclipse.wtp namespace." (from
http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-lepido/main.html)

I've played a little with this in their Cocoon Forms editor within
Lepdio - it's cool!

Another benfit of using that will be that we can start to bridge the two
communities, I personally believe Forrest should be leveraged as the
documentation generation system within Lepido and our eclipse plugin is
the way to realise that.

Ross