ILOG JViews Blog » Eclipse

JViews Shines through on Eclipse

Ed Király — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:40:23 +0000

Eclipse is an important platform for many of ILOG’s customers, and we have been working to ensure that the ILOG JViews products work well with it. Specifically, some of our customer use the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (or RCP) as an “application framework” because it provides a large number of commonly used services that all applications need, such as a consistent look-and-feel, window and view management, a good range of UI components, etc. RCP relies on SWT for drawing, however, and the drawing services offered by SWT still lag behind those of Java’s AWT and Java2D.

ILOG JViews tries to fill this gap, bringing rich graphical displays to Eclipse RCP. We do this in two different ways: by offering an enhanced bridge that lets you mix AWT and SWT, and also by adding professional-grade diagramming services to SWT.

In this 40 minute presentation, ILOG JViews Product Manager Jerome Joubert describes these two approaches and illustrates them with a number of demos. If you are using Eclipse RCP and you need highly-graphical displays, then you may find this presentation of interest.

The following movie is best viewed in full screen mode:

Originally presented in May, 2008 by Jerome Joubert.

Swing and SWT become more interoperable

Bruno Haible — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:20:59 +0000

One comes from Sun, the other comes from IBM. One emulates native look & feel, the other uses the platform’s widgets.

For a long time, Swing and SWT developers saw these two toolkits as conflicting. Today, it is no longer an either-or choice. Eclipse provides a bridge between the two toolkits, called SWT_AWT. On top of that, the project Albireo provides smoother integration. Both together allow you to embed Swing components so well that the user cannot know he is using different toolkits.

Albireo has just seen its first alpha release. It is available for download from the project wiki page:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Project

The download page is here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Download

and the basic documentation is here:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Albireo_Documentation

Albireo is sponsored by ILOG S.A. and by SAS Institute Inc.

At the moment, Albireo does not provide a solution for the problem of the distinct event threads; developers have to use invokeLater and asyncExec every time in this area.

For the ILOG JViews components, however, a solution to this problem is available as part of JViews; it allows you to embed JViews components into SWT GUIs without thinking at multithreading.