Yves YANG Philippe Ombredanne About us Yves YANG

Yves YANG & Philippe Ombredanne

About us Yves YANG has over 17 years of experience working with OO software development and mainly worked on Eclipse and ODBMS: Gem. Stone, Matisse and Versant. He was the chief architect of Eclipse. UML and cofounder/CTO of Omondo from 2002 to early 2006. He is also the project leader of an Open source: Eclipse. JDO. In Soyatec, he has developed two new products: e. BPMN designer and e. Face. His activities focus on the EMF/UML/BPMN/BPDM modeling, GUI/XAML/VE development and China Out. Sourcing. He is one of the initial committers of Eclipse BPMN 2. Philippe Ombredanne is a passionate open source software developer, Eclipse committer, activist and enthusiast plug-in developer. He is a maintainer for Easy. Eclipse, an open source distribution of useful Eclipse plug-ins, and active contributor to several open source Eclipse projects, including PHPEclipse, the Visual Editor, the Ajax Tooling Framework, the Drools IDE and more. As a volunteer, he led the Google Summer of Code program for Eclipse for the last two years. He is the CTO and co-founder of nex. B, a software company dedicated to open source and application life-cycle management tools and services Copyright © 2006 -2008 Soyatec. Licensed under the Eclipse Public License 1. 0

Agenda What’s VEX ? Why VEX ? VEX in action Demo & Feedback: CCR GUI Visual editor Demo & Feedback: e. Face XAML editor Development Guidelines Planned Features Development plan

What’s VEX ? The purpose of the VEX subproject is to develop a generic extensible solution on top of VE to visually edit GUI based on XML markup language, instead of Java code. XML dialect for GUI is a declarative approach to build UI of application. Several products and standards have adopted this technology: JSF - Java XForm – W 3 C XHTML – W 3 C Flex - Adobe XUL - Mozilla XAML – Microsoft SVG – W 3 C Open Laszlo - Laszlo

Why VEX ? Visual UI Editor UI Modeler Business Analyst Application architect UI Code Generator Visual UI Editor Final User Domain developer Component developer

Why VEX ? Declarative UI programming approaches provide a lot of advantages over traditional code based solutions such as: Better separation of the business logic and UI resources Better re-usability of UI components Enablement of developers role separation (UI designer, domain developer and UI component developer) Cleaner, more modular architecture

Why VEX ? WYSIWYG editor is a necessary element in this solution to improve the development productivity for both Eclipse RCP and web applications. It targets to following profiles of user: Business analyst Application architect Graphic designer Domain developer Component developer

Demo: CCR GUI Visual Editor CCR is a major international re-insurance company. CCR manages very large number of business forms (~1500) and needed a flexible way for business analysts to efficiently produce new business forms. « Time to market » is the primary requirement. It is an extension of Eclipse VE to edit the GUI in their own XML dialect. It relies on a domain GUI library on Swing.

Feedback: CCR GUI Visual editor It is an extension of Eclipse VE to edit the GUI in their own XML dialect. It relies on a domain GUI library on Swing. Wizards Generate different kinds of window and dialog through templates Fill the content through a model in dictionary XML source code viewer Undo/Redo Copy/paste UI Preview

Feedback: CCR GUI Visual editor Rule based and real-time error checking such as name and Tab Order conflicts Problem markers Tab Order designer Reset Tab Order through element’s location Switch Tab Orders by drag and drop Direct edit the Tab Order

Feedback: CCR GUI Visual editor GEF Override Palette VE Core Property sheet JEM Mappers Runtime Model EMF CCR GUI XML

Demo: e. Face XAML editor is a commercial visual design studio for XAML. It is an extension of Eclipse WST XML editor to edit XAML GUI files. It inherits all advantages and limitations of XML editor. It relies on e. Face engine with SWT render.

Feedback: e. Face XAML editor e. Face XAML implements following additional features: Direct GUI view Code completion Template block insertion Java source editor Java code generator

VEX Development Guidelines Framework Openness Possible to support all XML GUIs such as JSF, XForm, XUL, XAML, etc Easy of use Target all project engineers, including Business analyst and graphic designer Extensible Extends the VE architecture

VEX planned Features Extension of VE Mapping facilities between DOM and JEM Rule-based validation via Extension Point Problem markers Tab Order editor Morphing

VEX planned Features Integration with WST XML editor XML and GUI view synchronization Code completion Template support Template management facilities

Development plan Short term, the initial contribution of the VEX framework to the Eclipse VE project is being prepared for review, and new committers are being on boarded in VE First exemplary implementation will target a simple XML language for SWT such as XSWT or EXSWT or similar. Beyond that we expect to foster collaboration with other open source projects and organizations inside and outside of Eclipse. VEX opportunities for reuse and collaboration include Domain specific visual editors Web tools Open. MRS …