Implementing a Web user interface for Eclipse components

Introduction: In this article, learn how to use technologies that WEB developers can employ, such as Dojo, Adobe Flex, and OpenLaszlo, to add spice to Eclipse-based applications. In addition, you will be able to easily transform your application from a desktop application into a browser-based application, providing more deployment options.

Brief introduction

In recent years, the WEB has become one of the most popular software platforms in the industry. Web applications are widely accepted on the one hand because of the wide availability of the World Wide Web, on the other hand, because there are a lot of great user interface (UI) technologies available in the Web application platform. For example, Dojo, Adobe Flex, OpenLaszlo, and so on, they can provide attractive interactive clients that can greatly improve the user experience.

Desktop applications, such as Eclipse, focus primarily on designing a UI with good usability and high user efficiency, and it is generally difficult to see a desktop application containing interactive UI. Within Eclipse, there is a flexible toolbox draw2d that can be used to build the UI. However, it has many limitations. For example, it supports only static images (such as JPG and GIF) and does not support dynamic images (such as SVG). And, in draw2d, the effects and animations are quite complex to implement, and developers are often reluctant to get involved.

In this article, we'll introduce a UI paradigm for the Eclipse application: Building the Eclipse UI component with web-based UI technology.

Why integrate a Web UI into Eclipse?

Eclipse is the most popular development platform today. Its highly scalable framework gives it a high esteem, and many applications are now built on Eclipse. One standard way to implement the UI within Eclipse is to use the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), JFace, and draw2d framework. With these UI frameworks, you can easily implement applications that are user-satisfied and have similar impressions to other applications that are used within that environment. In most cases, these frameworks can be a good way to help you build the best UI for your users.

However, using the standard UI framework provided by Eclipse often makes it difficult to achieve the most refined, intuitive, user-friendly UI. For example, it is sometimes important to implement effects such as shading and color gradients. Also, zooming in on the visual objects in the Eclipse graphics View/editor makes the appearance of these images (GIF or JPG format) rough. To solve these problems, you need to write a custom renderer to control the design and graphics of the UI. However, developers who have written the renderer must know that the job is not fun. An undesirable UI design often affects the usability of an application.

Most WEB UIs provide built-in support for high-end visuals, such as animations, and support for dynamic images such as SVG. As a result, developers on these platforms can easily implement the UI in the way they want.

In addition, the ECLIPSE components developed using WEB interface technology can be easily migrated to the world Wide Web, which provides great flexibility for deployment.

What components within Eclipse can leverage the Web UI?

Any UI within Eclipse can be implemented through the Web UI. A typical Eclipse Workbench in the Java perspective is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. A typical Eclipse Workbench in a Java perspective

Theoretically, all views and editors can be implemented using the Web UI. However, within an Eclipse-based component, Web UI technology can only be used to implement the UI. The core logic of a component should still be implemented by the ECLIPSE environment.