Eclipse RCP-based appilication's GUI: interactive design or coding?

Question

Hello.

First of all, for the sake of clarity: the question is addressed to those who have experience with ERCP, for those who make, say, business applications. The question is not about a general approach to GUI creation.

I am considering the Eclipse RCP as a platform for desktop applications. I am at the very start (I mean with ERCP), I've read some tutorials, helps, sites etc. and so far I did not understand one thing. What is the usual use of ERCP when it comes to GUI design: is it done by means of some GUI designer or is it usually hand-coded?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Usually Eclipse RCP applications (which are based of SWT) are hand coded affairs.

The Eclipse FAQ states that there isn't a GUI builder:

http://www.eclipse.org/swt/faq.php#guibuilder

although there is a project underway called the Visual Editor Project to provide GUI building tools:

http://www.eclipse.org/vep/

Hope that helps, not sure whether there are any useful third party products that will help.

EDIT: Actually there are some third party products, check out SWT Designer:

http://www.instantiations.com/windowbuilder/swtdesigner/

and Jigloo:

http://www.cloudgarden.com/jigloo/index.html

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/edu/os-dw-os-eclipse-jigloo.html

Answer 2

We used the visual editor (VE) in Eclipse, but it was largely written by IBM internally, and they stopped maintaining it so it no longer works (easily) in versions after 3.2.

You can have a look at our "internal" page for getting it to work with 3.3.2 (and probably other 3.3.X): http://dev.nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/wiki/EclipseVisualEditor

When it works the visual editor can be quite nice, once you get a feel for what code it modifies it is also possible to mix your own code and the generated code.

In the end though, the VE is not powerful enough that you never have to tweak the code by hand, and you'll probably have to learn SWT/JFace by hand anyway. Also, it is slighly unstable, will sometimes crash and will often cause Eclipse to run out of memory.