A common usecase is running long processes and waiting for their completion. Therefore responsiveness is an important feature, that can be realized with the jobs-framework provided by eclipse. The user wants to continue working while a long running job is scheduled, not sitting in front of a frozen UI that is not responding until the job has finished.

Today I want to demonstrate some key features of the jobs api and encourage RCP developers to use the functionality to make a user friendly interaction and a clear management of your application-specific jobs. A good article for this topic you can find on the eclipse-website.

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Do you know the Perspective-Bar? - And have you ever tried to integrate the perspecitve-bar in your RCP? If yes, did you suceed?

From my experience, perspectives are really useful for representing blocks of funtionality, something like a workflow or a set of requirements that are bundled. The perspective-bar is a very nice feature, necessary in the JDT but has a great disadvantage: The lack of integrity.

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When I made my first “Hello World” PlugIn I didn’t care about such things like Data-Workflow or Application Data Tree, I just tried the different features the framework provided. But as the applications became more and more complex and also the amount of different views, perspectives and editors increased I was forced to implement different mechanism to manage all the different data and their presentation. In this article I want to show how to install the Model-View-Controller in your RCP to make a clear software-archictcture and flexible ways for interacting between view and model.

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Have you ever recognized the complex widgets that are implemented in the IDE plugins?- The most different use cases shipped by plugins like the Compare-Plugin, Team-Plugin, JDT-Plugin are realized with very good looking and also good feeling widgets. So I thought I try to encapsulate such a widget that I can use it in every context. This article gives an overview about a DetailedSectionViewer, which is based on the org.eclipse.ltk.internal.ui.refactoring.history.RefactoringHistoryControl. (more…)

In Eclipse 3.1 there was always the problem that you couldn’t give a sort indicator to a sortable TableViewer. This issue was resolved with Eclipse 3.2. Today I want to show a simple TableViewer with a sorting and indicators, filters and a column reordering. Unfortunately the implementation for the sorters on JFace-Viewers don’t support an ascending or desending flag that takes also care for the indicator-representation. We have to implement this for our own.

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Every RCP-Developer is familiar with this question. From a technical view the differences are very well explained by the authors from the eclipse3.0 faq. But is this really helpful? - Which criteria are really important in deciding which graphical components you’ll use? In this article I’ll share my experiences and decisions regarding views and editors.

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Today I want to show how to use of the open-source project SWT-Calendar. With a few lines of code you can implement a wonderful small calendar widget for SWT, that is not delivered by default.

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If you’re having dependencies to org.eclipse.ui.ide and you launch your RCP you’ll automatically get an entry in the menu-bar that is called “Convert Line Delimiters to” and also “Last Edit Location”, although you don’t need it. To remove this entries place the following lines in your (more…)

It is always recommended to deliver a JRE with your Eclipse-Product, because it has tow major advantages.

1. The client needn’t to install java (probably he doesn’t have the rights or the competence).
2. You can be sure that all your clients use the same version and vendor of the vm.

But theres also a great advantage: Sun doesn’t provide by default a manifest-file for displaying the widgets in the current theme of your operating-system (see http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6178745), but uses the default look&feel of Windows. To fix this you need to the javaw.exe.manifest, located in your org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_x.y.z.jar-Plugin Package.

To bundle your VM, just create a folder “jre” in your [Eclipse-Root]-Directory copy the vm, take the Manifest-file and copy it to [Eclipse-Root]/jre/bin

Probably you was already faced with the requirement to add small icons to your pulldowns. That looks very nice, but unfortunately there is no common SWT-Widget to realize this.
Fortunately the Eclipse-Framework is OpenSource and we can reprodruce the structure of a SWT-ComboBox. A Combo is not more than a text-field and a small button with an arrow. In addition is a event-handler implemented that shows a Composite as a tooltip with the entries of the “combo-list”. We just have to take this class and change the structure of the content. We don’t want to have a org.eclipse.swt.widgets.List, but a org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Table with multiple org.eclipse.swt.widgets.TableItems where you can specify an image. After adjusting the access-methods we have a new cool Widget, that has the same structure and methods like the “built-in”s.

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