Is the widget in the middle of swt-designer available?

[scharf]

Hi,

I really like the cool widget in the middle of swt-designer design page (the widget, that contains the Controls in categories and has the little pins). I assume this is a windows-olny widget? Is this widget available somehow?

Michael

[admin]

This is not really widget, i.e. SWT control. Palette is GEF/Draw2D figure that is standard for all GEF-based editors and available with source in GEF SDK. And it works not only under Windows, but also for other operating systems.

[Paul Singleton]

This is not really widget, i.e. SWT control. Palette is GEF/Draw2D figure that is standard for all GEF-based editors and available with source in GEF SDK. And it works not only under Windows, but also for other operating systems.

But could it (in principle, at least) be wrapped as an SWT third-party custom control, and added (with cool self-reference) to Designer's Control Palette?

You know, like we can add zillions of ActiveX controls to VB

[admin]

Sorry, this is not first line task for us.
You all have source code of GEF, so feel free to do this yourself.

[Paul Singleton]

Sorry, this is not first line task for us.
You all have source code of GEF, so feel free to do this yourself.

Hey, this was just a question, not a feature request!

I see from your roadmap that you plan to support user written controls using extention points - that's great.

I just wondered, given that you guys must know GEF and its control palette really well, whether you reckon it could be _wrapped_ as an SWT control, requiring gef.jar to be redistributed with apps (or would the source have to be hacked? )

Thinks: should the GEF crowd be writing cool controls for Eclipse that DON'T fit into the SWT/JFace framework? Should GEF be more integrated? Presumably y'all use Designer to develop itself, but had to code the Control Palette and Content Pane gui stuff by hand?

[admin]

Sorry, this is not first line task for us.
You all have source code of GEF, so feel free to do this yourself.

Hey, this was just a question, not a feature request!

Yes, I understand.

I see from your roadmap that you plan to support user written controls using extention points - that's great.

Yes, we have code for support user controls, at least in easy cases, when only new properties are added (i.e. without support user edit policies). Only thing I should wait is decision to use or not obfuscator.

I just wondered, given that you guys must know GEF and its control palette really well, whether you reckon it could be _wrapped_ as an SWT control, requiring gef.jar to be redistributed with apps (or would the source have to be hacked? )

We know GEF, at least many parts of it, but palette control is internal, i.e. we don't use it directly, it is used by GEF itself. So, we can look inside of it and try to implement it in pure SWT, but we will not do this.

Thinks: should the GEF crowd be writing cool controls for Eclipse that DON'T fit into the SWT/JFace framework? Should GEF be more integrated? Presumably y'all use Designer to develop itself, but had to code the Control Palette and Content Pane gui stuff by hand?

Both control palette and content pane have big support in GEF, what we do is writing code for painting figures, edit policies for support layouts and complex controls. And of course big pieces of code for editing source code.