Generating beautiful UI‘s With EMF, JFace and Databinding

Lars Vogel

Most (Business)

UI‘s are horrible

• Mhotivation

• EMF as UI storage

• EMF as UI generator

• Future Plans & Discussion

… and I will show code & examples

The next 10 minutes

Typical UI Painpoints

• To complex• Unflexible• Overloaded• Too many opions

• Too simple• Not enough options• ….

Inspiration

• Modeled User Interfaces are becoming popular in e4

– Modeled Workbench– Toolkit Model

EMF can be used to store the UI state

• Load EMF model at startup• Save EMF model at shutdown

Some but not huge advantages (similar to Memento)

Approach

Use EMF domain model information to generate the UI automatically

Application Domain Model

UI Model (based on Toolkit Model)

Generate UI

Generate flexibility

• Rename fields• Hide fields• Remember last input• Re-arrange the UI‘s

Summary

• Generate new UI‘s Minutes• UI can be adjusted by the end user.• Future steps:

– Use CSS styling– in Migrate to Eclipse e4– Evaluate alternative approaches

• Waazabi, • Eclipse Presentation Modeling Framework

Contact & Future Questions• Lars.Vogel@gmail.com

• http://www.vogella.de• www.twitter.com/vogella

Photo credits• Dog http://www.sxc.hu/photo/302062• Agenda: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1089869• Elephant: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/103473• Mouse http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1097314• Book http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1184809• Student: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/660438• UML Diagram http://www.sxc.hu/photo/33012• Liquid http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1109534• Person with remote http://www.sxc.hu/photo/485640