In my last post I published the demo applications I planned to show of at EADD in Karlsruhe and here are the PDF-slides.
The talk was split into 4 areas:
- History and Reasons
- Design ideas (EMF-Model, IEclipseContext, Declarative Styling, DI)
- The implementation of the ideas + BackwardsCompat
- Demos:
- Application development with EMF-XMI-Editor using the E4-PhotoDemo
- Declarative-Themeing via E4-Contacts-Demo
- Workbench-Renders: Using PShelf and Ribbon using the E4-Contacts-Demo
- Backwards compat by launching our E4-Builds and writing a HelloWorld application
- Abandoning of Static and Singleton by launching E4-Contacts-Demo as a RAP-Application with unmodified workbench code
The talk was quite well received and I showed how we try to create innovation in the core-platform. I’d like to thank EclipseSource who made my travel to Karlsruhe possible by funding the half of my travel costs.
Tomsondev Blog 
Thank you for sharing the presentation. E4 looks very cool!
I have a question about “The Perspective Problem” (slide 21):
Why are perspectives contained in the UI tree? I would expect that a perspective never contain a UI part but have a link to it. The perspective concept is like a switcher switching (or reseting) the layout plus some functionality. What will happen if you copy a perspective (= create a new one based on an existing)? Normally, the object itself and its containment will be duplicated. But this is not what we want…
We also thought about using this strategy (I think the discussion we had was not in the public but I can try to look it up) but decided against it because it also imposes other problems. We took the path that it is much more natural to make the perspective a part of the UI-Hierarchy instead of making it a layout concept (which it is today’s workbench BTW) because it has other problems.