I know there is a very similar topic to this here but I have looked at the answers posted for it and I feel my problem is slightly different and doesn't need the same approach.
I'm developing an Eclipse plugin which is in essence a GUI that provides the user with different menus, buttons, editing areas etc. It's designed to be an all in one tool to help with coding, re-using code and re-structuring it.
I need a few pointers towards the resources available that can help me build this GUI and have it available as a plugin so I can get the ball rolling. I've looked at the suggestions in the link above but I don't feel like my plugin needs for example a model, view, controller design pattern. I just need the ability to have a GUI pop up when the user starts the plugin and have them interact with it.
Any suggestions or ideas are very much appreciated.
Your GUI has to be an multi-page editor. One (or more) page(s) for the GUI, and one page for the code.
Use the "Plug-in with a multi-page editor" template to get started.
This answer should help you fill out your template code.
When you have a specific question, feel free to ask again.
Take a look at the Tutorials at vogella.de especially the Eclipse plugin section. Those tutorials are usually very good. I learned Eclipse RCP with it.
Related
I'm developing an Eclipse plug-in, mostly as a learning exercise, in which I have a wizard page. In this wizard page I would like to have a small text area that behaves like a code editor with the appropriate content assist and information hovers etc, much like the breakpoint properties wizard has for adding conditions.
I'm new to plug-in development and I may not have quite picked up the vocabulary, so I'm not having much luck searching for examples. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
I assume that you are looking for an embeddable Java source editor - and with that you hit a difficult topic.
The source viewer mentioned by Chris Gerken is called JDISourceViewer. It is instantiated and configured in JavaBreakpointConditionEditor::createControl.
If you cannot find the mentioned classes, or if you want to experiment with them, then open the Plug-ins view, find the org.eclipse.jdt.debug.ui plug-in and select Import As > Source Project from the context menu.
Unfortunately - in the beginning - the (Java) editors weren't designed to be embedded outside of the editor area and many editor participants (e.g. actions, formatter, etc) still expect an IEditorPart. Hence it is a quirky and complicated endeavour to use an editor in a dialog or the like.
Moreover, the Java source editing infrastructure is not exposed as public API. It isn't meant to be used by clients and can change at any time without prior notice. You will see respective warnings in yoyur code. For a learning exercise, however, that shouldn't matter much.
I'm linking a database to NetBeans now and I need to create a interface for this. But when I need to adjust the position of button, label is difficult. Is it possible that show a GUI design view that easy for me to adjust without use the JFrame component?
If I understood your question correctly, you're looking for a GUI builder for Swing.
Netbeans ships with the Matisse Swing GUI Builder which will help you build GUIs easily and quickly. Tutorials aren't uncommon (such as the official tutorial or some user created videos on YouTube).
Some folks are fine with this work flow (since it speeds up development quite a bit). Others want to use custom frameworks and have requirements to use specific layouts in which case I recommend reading about different layout managers.
Take your pick and happy development! :)
Instead of trying to design your entire application in the GUI editor, you may be able to adapt the approach shown here. This will let you focus on a single container at a time. Also, remember to backup your .form files; more here.
netbeans platform has proved to be most useful for large applications. But what about small applications?
I'm building a small Price-List making software which only has one TopComponent which contains a JTable and a few buttons.
This component I've set to have closing/sliding etc disabled as this is mandatory to be there. I also DO NOT want to have ANY more top components.
Is there a way to remove the tabs? It seems pointles to show just one tab with the name of the TopComponent.
I hope you get what I mean!
Thanks in advance.
Molten Ice,
Geertjan Wielenga's blog is an invaluable source of information for the NetBeans Platform. He's written a post especially for this task:
http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/farewell_to_space_consuming_weird
I've used this technique before and it works fine.
If you have any other questions related to the NetBeans Platform I would suggest that you try the Plaform Users section of the NetBeans forums.
I'm thinking about writing a simple UI designer in Java. I'm just playing with ideas at the moment to see if it is feasible.
It would be good to have something like this as all of our UIs are generated from XML. Just wondering if anyone has tried anything like this before. I know there will be a lot of effort in doing something like this.
Does anyone know of any 3rd party products that already do something like this?
If not then at a simple level, it will have drag and drop support for any component that can be positioned on a panel. Then extra bits will be added. Are there any good samples on the net for this?
Cheers
Dated back to 2005, this has an overview of Java UI Builders:
http://www.fullspan.com/articles/java-gui-builders.html
Here is a page on how to use the Eclipse Visual Editor:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecvisual/
Here is a good page on the different approaches to build UIs in Java:
http://leepoint.net/notes-java/GUI/misc/80gui-generator.html
Which GUI technology are you using? Swing? NetBeans has a very good drag-and-drop Swing GUI editor. For Eclipse there are several plugins.
If you want to see other projects in which a Swing GUI is generated from XML config files, there are different libraries that do this.
Eclipse 4.0 Developer Preview was just released with an xml based toolkit called XWT. It can be styled with CSS and has a GUI builder. This is a developer preview and there will be some changes over the next year as it progresses to release 4.1, but it is useable right now and the community support is really good.
I've been trying to create a GUI using netbeans, that includes a dialog similar to Netbean's own "property dialog" that appears when designing. ie. a dialog that contains a table that can be expanded by tree nodes. Something like the dialog on this page, http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-property-editors.html
As far as I can understand, the page I linked to describes a custom editor I can set up for use within netbeans while designing - I'm just looking for a way to doing something similar for my actual application I'm writing. Is there an easy way to do this?
I came across this and have tried it but it doesn't quite work in the same way as the standard Netbeans dialog. weblogs.java.net/blog/timboudreau/archive/2008/06/egads_an_actual.html
Any tips greatly appreciated.
This will sound flip... but I am being serious.
The easiest way to do this is to write your app using the NetBeans RCP platform.
You may want to look at the Swing Application Framework, too.
There are a couple SAF samples integrated into NetBeans... You can read about them here: http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/java/gui-saf.html
I could not find a property editor dialog sample, though.
I found a couple other pointers, using this query: http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+write+a+property+editor+dialog+in+swing
You could take a look into the l2fprod components
(source: l2fprod.com)