My name is Leandro Loriato. I’m working on an Ecplise RCP based project that needs to implement a diagram editor and I am planning to use JGo. I know there’s a version of JGo for SWT but I still have some questions that I hope you guys can answer:
Your JGo SWT Version works very well on a SWT standalone application. But how can I integrate this with the view and editor concepts of Eclipse RCP? Can I easily port an JGo made application to a plugin for RCP platform? How tightly coupled with the “low-level” components of SWT, like Shell or Display, is your library (in RCP I may some times only interact with the higher-level abstractions provided from Eclipse)?
There are some fancy tabs that come with this product. Will they vanish when I transform this application in an Eclipse’s Editor?
Can I customize the way the models are persisted?
How easy is the creation of a customize dialog for the palette?
What dependencies will this component add to my project? Just your library and SWT?
JGo provides an org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Control, namely JGoView, and various other classes inheriting from Object to provide a JGoDocument and JGoObjects. JGoView does not implement any tabs – it’s just a simple Control.
Like any Control, it needs to be created in the context of a Shell or Display, but it doesn’t really interact with any other Controls, except for scrollbars and when managing in-place text editors or other hosted Controls via JGoControl.
JGo doesn’t require persisting documents in any particular format or media. You can and should implement whatever you want.
I don’t know what you mean by a “customize dialog for the palette”.
RCP already includes SWT, so the only additional dependency is JGo itself.
I think I was not so clear in some parts. By “customize dialog for the palette” I mean some dialog that could be used by the user to add components to the palette of the diagram editor. In the worst case I know I can this by using pure SWT but I would rather use some higher-level solution if JGo provided it. I thought, because this product is intended for creating a diagram editor, that you could have incorporated some facilities like this.
So, you are telling me that all the things that you use in JGo are implemented in terms of SWT without using any other (higher) abstraction. So in any place I could add SWT widgets, I could add your JGo components, am I right?
Whether or not the user can add things to a palette is very application specific, so there isn’t anything that we have ever offered along those lines. If there is such a capability in an application, usually developers can easily define dialogs to define such objects. Occasionally developers will offer a separate editor using JGo to allow users to customize such items visually, but that’s uncommon. I guess it depends on what kinds of items you would expect to have in a palette.
Regarding your second point – that’s right. Anywhere you can use an SWT widget, you can use a JGoView.