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E4/position papers/Yves YANG

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Position Paper: Yves YANG

Nowadays, UI development in Eclipse is mainly direct programming mode: UI controls and event handling are directly created in Java. This solution presents several drawbacks:

  • High technology pre-requisite as UI developer
  • Difficult to separate UI appearance and business logic
  • Poor reusability
  • Limitation of the dynamic UI support
  • Very hard to integrate with develop tools

The Declarative UI should be a foundation solution to resolve these problems. Some of them can be resolved directly, and some of them needs a tools built on top of this component such Visual Editor, modeling tool.

This component can be used by three kinds of developer:

  • SWT Developer
  • UI designer
  • Model designer

Position.png

SWT Developer

SWT Developer should have a deep knowledge of UI technology such as SWT/JFace, JFace databindng, PDE, etc. She/he needs a component-based framework to develop reusable UI Components for Domain UI Designer.

UI designer

UI Designer is a domain application developer. She/he focuses on building domain application using UI Components provided by SWT Developer. The knowledge on SWT/JFace is not necessary.

Model designer

Model Designer is a domain application developer using MDA tools. She/he needs a Template engine to generate UI from the business model.

Essential features

The following features are very critical for this framework:

  • Extensibility - Dynamic mapping with UI technology library such as SWT/Jface
  • Support of Data Binding
  • Component approach to guarantee the reusability
  • Support of the MDA

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