E4 and my impression

Haveing attended the E4 Talk, A Future of SWT and the E4 BOF. I’m looking forward for a lot of innovation and discussion about new architectures at various levels of the Eclipse-Platform.

The most important thing to notice is that E4 is much more than simply bringing RCP to the webspace. Still I’m going to concentrate on the UI-Aspect of E4 in the rest of the post.

There’s never been a better time to start getting involved because I myself (or you yourself) can to some extend define how the future looks like.

From the discussion I had with all the guys from the Platform/SWT/…-team I feel fairly comfortable infact I’m glad the Platform/SWT-Team recognized that RAP is not the only solution to get RCP-Applications run inside the browsers. The current SWT-prototype code uses established technologies like GWT, Dojo. In fact with the current prototype design SWT is going to be for DOJO what GWT-Ext/MyGWT are for Ext-Js nowadays.

UFacekit and E4

Do we still have to put effort into UFacekit?

When I first saw what’s been done by the E4-Prototypers my first reaction was: Do we still need to work UFacekit? My answer is definately YES because UFacekite is more than providing a possibility to run your Desktop-UI inside a Browser. UFacekit has more to offer than a uniform Widget-API. UFacekit provides other values:

• Eclipse-Core-Databinding compatible to GWT
• Eclipse-EMF-Ecore compatible to GWT
• Highlevel-Abstraction for Eclipse-Databinding
• Easy support for Decoration, …
• … and much more

If SWT for Browser is getting reality (and it will trust me) people will want to use all this stuff in their application and then UFace provides them with all they need.

How can UFacekit profit

Well we get a first class Browser-Widget implementation for free or even better we can take part to make this happen (I’m willing get part of this effort) and use it in UFacekit.

UFacekit News

• I added an Example how to use EMF + UFacekit inside GWT.
  You can take a look at the code here.
• Angelo started to add CSS-Support for SWT-Widget in his own project and offered to donate it to UFacekit but I didn’t had time to take look how to use it in UFacekit until now
• Work on GWT-Ext port continues but getting the layout stuff right is a real pain