Just a few minutes ago I blogged about our future plans for e(fx)clipse and to show you that we take the things mentionned there really serious I can provide you an initial report on the first 2 points from the the list:
- Freedom of development style
- Freedom of development tool
Since its inception the way to develop “e4 on JavaFX” meant:
- useage Eclipse PDE inside your Eclipse IDE
- useage Maven-Tycho as the headless build system
We will start to change that and in the weeks to come!
First and most important
We won’t take away ANYTHING – if you want to use PDE and Tycho please do so – we are going to support that development style like did in the past!
The future is pure maven/gradle
I’ve played around a lot in the past weeks with Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Netbeans and VS Code to find what would work out best and I think I’ve reached a point where I can provide you some screenshots and screen casts.
Eclipse
In Eclipse all I need to develop my application is the m2e extension.
VS Code
To give me the extra kick I decided to give VS-Code and the Java-Extension from RedHat a shot.
The technology
Now that you have looked at the cool screen-cast let’s talk about the boring technology in the backend. We rely on 2 things:
- That we publish the complete e(fx)clipse platform in a Maven-Repository
- The excellent biz.aQute.bnd/bnd-maven-plugin part of the bnd-toolsuite
Tomsondev Blog 
Hi Tom,
Thanks for all the work you’re doing in e(fx)clipse. I am new to the Eclipse RCP (worked with NetBeans RCP in the past) and I am evaluating using e(fx)clipse for my next project. As far as I can tell, your project might be the only one providing a pure JavaFX framework with a window system for Desktop Applications. I foresee a great success for your project once it gets more attention from JavaFX developers. Congratulations!
I was reading your post and couldn’t resist thinking your setup might be possible with Gradle. Could you please share the configuration you used for those tests? I would like to try to replicate it in NetBeans+Gradle.
Also, do you think Eclipse will provide the e4 Model Editor as an independent maven project to be used in other IDEs?
Thanks!
* on the setup: I’ll see if I still have the sample around somewhere
* on model editor: Yes, we need to provide a model-editor for other IDEs but we need to implement it from scratch because the one in Eclipse is built on SWT
Thanks for the answer Tom!
Just in case, there is a plugin for gradle called wuff (unfortunately it seems it is lacking maintenance and it does not support recent versions of Eclipse RCP out of the box), but it might help you. Here is the link: https://github.com/akhikhl/wuff/wiki/Gradle-plugins
I knew about that but as we are now delivering maven artifacts I think the situation got easier.
HI Tom,
would you mind to publish the example setup? I’d really like to see a starting point using IDEA/bnd with e4.
You need to make a difference between bnd and maven-bnd. If you want to use bnd take a look at https://github.com/redrezo/e4fx-bnd it’s for 2.x or even earlier but should provide a starting point, the maven stuff is at https://github.com/BestSolution-at/e4-efxclipse-maven-sample and for launching i wrote https://github.com/BestSolution-at/maven-e4-launcher but this is just a temporary solution because things like debugging does not work appropriately
Do you plan to make the “new model editor” also work in Eclipse? It seems very hard to maintain the current SWT implementation.
Hm where did i write about a “new model editor” 🙂 but you are right we work on a javafx version of a e4xmi editor but it’s still in its infancy but we certainly need an SWT free editor 🙂
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