Tim: What progress is Eclipse making in supporting non-Java languages? I know C++ is fairly advanced.
#Visual uml editor eclipse how to#
I wouldn’t want to have some sort of Eclipse apparatchik telling people how to develop every piece of software in the Eclipse community. When it comes to things like style and workflow and so on, I would like that to be answered by the community in the way that most things like this are answered, and that is by having people tell the developers of a particular piece of software that they don’t like the way it works. If someone’s building something in an open source way they want people to use it. I think that the community forms a marketplace, even in the open source project. Mike: There is a style guide on Eclipse, but I don’t know if I want to go too far down that path because I don’t want to do something that would stifle innovation. Tim: I guess style guidelines are also important, because developers don’t like to switch between different UI styles within one tool. But I hope that at some point down the road you will see some sort of program by which you can get plug-ins which have been certified that they do conform with the APIs and that they should be expected to work in cooperation with other plug-ins in your environment. I actually think it is going to take a significant amount of time for us to get this off the ground. The second thing is that we are looking at ways internally within the Eclipse community to define and build some sort of certification program. So that is one thing that is happening in the community that I think over time will help address this. Innoopract in Germany has put together an Eclipse distro that bundles together Eclipse 3.0 with on the order of 25 of the most popular plug-ins, and they have done the effort to make sure that these all work together well, and provide a good out-of-the-box experience for developers. The first is, I’m seeing the emergence of distributions. There’s basically two different things happening within the community that I believe are going to address this over time. First and foremost, lots of plug-in developers cheat, There is a well-defined API that plug-in developers are supposed to stick to, and many of them don’t. And there’s several different reasons why that’s true. It is possible to load a set of plug-ins in your environment which do not cooperate in the ways that they should. Tim: One criticism I’ve heard of the Eclipse project is that there’s too much diversity among the different plug-ins, and that there isn’t a tight enough standard in terms of how an Eclipse plug-in should behave.
Mike: Yes, and within Eclipse I’m trying to encourage more in terms of providing integration with the visual editor and the rich client platform, to help enable people to build these kinds of rich client applications. Tim: The ordinary developer, who isn’t going to build a GUI builder themselves, will be particularly interested in what they can get bundled with Eclipse. So what the Visual Editor team is doing is completely consistent with what’s going on with what’s going on with the platform project and pretty much every other project inside Eclipse. And then we build a tool on top of it to show people how you can use those frameworks. People think of Eclipse as being an open source framework for building tools, but people inside Eclipse actually think of it primarily as for building extensible frameworks. Our design goal is that Eclipse, and you’ll see at several different places on our web site, where we talk about building extensible frameworks and exemplary tools. Mike: Yes, and that’s consistent with everything that goes on at Eclipse. Tim: Although it is as you say, a framework for creating GUI builders, it does come bundled with GUI builders.
So again, you have a framework even at this level where we will be able to offer developers choice. One of the interesting wrinkles of that is that it supports both Swing and SWT. So it’s not a GUI builder, it’s a framework for creating GUI builders. It’s intended to be a very generic framework for creating GUI builders. The Visual Editor project falls under that category. Mike: There’s a set of projects within Eclipse which are basically generic frameworks. Can you outline what the goals of that are? Tim: Could I ask about another project, the Visual Editor project. The Visual Editor, plug-in guidelines, UML and modeling
0 kommentar(er)
