Preface

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This redbook is written for developers who use the Eclipse SDK to develop plug-in code. It is intended for a technical readership and for developers who already have good knowledge and experience in Eclipse plug-in development. We expect that you understand the concepts of Eclipse views and editors, and have some familiarity with Draw2D.

In this redbook, we examine two frameworks that are developed by the Eclipse Tools Project for use with the Eclipse Platform:

• The Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)

• The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)

Important: 

This redbook covers both the Graphical Editing Framework and the Eclipse Modeling Framework, but readers should remember that these frameworks can be used separately and there is no dependency between the two frameworks. We do write about using GEF and EMF together, but please remember that this is not required, and many applications you develop will not require both GEF and EMF.

We provide a high level introduction to these frameworks so that Eclipse plug-in developers can consider whether the frameworks will be useful for the requirements of their particular development; then we provide helpful tips and techniques for writing code that uses GEF and EMF. Finally, we implement a more detailed example to illustrate a GEF editor that uses an EMF model.

The team that wrote this redbook

This redbook was produced by a team of specialists from around the world working at the International Technical Support Organization, Raleigh Center.

William Moore (Bill) is a WebSphere specialist at the International Technical Support Organization, Raleigh Center. He writes extensively and teaches IBM® classes on WebSphere and related topics. Before joining the ITSO, Bill was a Senior AIM Consultant at the IBM Transarc lab in Sydney, Australia. He has 18 years of application development experience on a wide range of computing platforms and using many different coding languages. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Waikato, in Hamilton, New Zealand. His current areas of expertise include application development tools, object-oriented programming and design, and e-business application development.

David Dean is a Technical Lead at Chordiant in Cupertino, California. For the last two years he has been focused on Eclipse plug-in development and in building a GEF-based workflow editor. His twenty years of software development experience include medical imaging, process control, telephony, finance, and Web applications. David's interests include user interfaces, graphics, and software development tools. He holds a BA degree in Biology from the State University of New York at Albany, and did post-graduate studies in Historic Preservation Planning at Cornell University.

Anna Gerber is currently a Research Scientist at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre (DSTC) in Brisbane, Australia. Anna's research interests include Enterprise Modelling; in particular, model-driven development techniques and generation of tools such as domain-specific graphical editors from models.

Gunnar Wagenknecht is a software developer at Intershop AG in Jena, Germany.He has professional experience in developing Java™ Enterprise applications using the J2EE framework, and he developed a visual editor for modelling business processes during the last year. He just finished his thesis and is going to get a Bachelor's degree in Practical Computer Science from the Business Academy Thuringia in Gera, Germany after finishing the residency. His areas of expertise include object-oriented software architectures and Web application development. He has written extensively on GEF topics.

Philippe Vanderheyden is an IT Architect who has been working with object-oriented (OO) technologies for many years. Philippe has been working on a variety of projects, ranging from document publishing systems to financial application development and monitoring. His areas of interest include OO modelling, distributed enterprise systems, and Web-based application design and real-time transactional systems. Philippe has a good knowledge of the Java programming language, and Java-related technologies (JDBC, servlets, XML, JSP, etc.). His recent work has included building enterprise applications using the Enterprise Java Beans component model and the J2EE framework in WebSphere 5.0 cluster environment. Philippe is comfortable working with a diverse range of technologies and platforms. He has extensive experience of the UNIX® OS and has also worked for many years with Object Oriented languages (Java, Smalltalk, and C++).

Thanks to the following people for their contributions to this project:

Randy Hudson
Pat McCarthy
IBM Raleigh

Jim D'Anjou
IBM San Jose

Yvonne Lyon, editor
International Technical Support Organization, San Jose Center

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