INTRODUCTION

The WidgetServer Eclipse IDE Plugin Set is designed to help with developement with the WidgetServer Framework. The set consists of four plugins and a feature plugin. The main goal has been to aid in the development of WidgetServer constructed applications using a modern IDE. Eclipse provides many useful features, and the sub-projects even more so. Especially since, Eclipse is designed for integration.
The News tab has a list of many of latest changes.
New! A short flash presentation of the New Project Wizards (built with Wink) to view it click upon the screen cast. It is short and quick and may answer some questions that people have...namely how to get started.

Previously

The full version of the WidgetServer Framework includes a tool built with the framework and which is used to build and test the GUI features, called The Builder. The Builder is still a useful tool but it has its limitations.
  • It just 'looks' older, modern development tools just look different (more a gut feeling)
  • No linking to the Java files, no Java editor.
  • Modern tool support like CVS, ANT, JUnit and such (comes with most IDE frameworks)
  • Too centralized around the GUI file (debatable point here). What I mean is that it is not useful for modifying other files nor seeing the project structure.

Some of its good points would be:

  • Very detailed on the GUI building
  • Runtime review
  • Event Channel introspection
  • Is a GUI designer
Eclipse with the standard plugins from the Eclipse site is quite capable, and one can get by with using it as the development environment with little hassle. Quite possible to develop WidgetServer applications with nothing else. But there are some minor issues that we have tried to address; for after all, Eclipse is intended to be extended.
  • No current linking of files declared within the GUI declaration files.
  • No specific WidgetServer Rules and validations
  • No help on recognizing and implementing the listener classes.
  • No way to see what tags are available and what is allowed.
  • The current wizards were not tailored to WidgetServer.
  • No Jetty server integration (nice for a preview, quick and easy)

What the Plugins offer:

The Eclipse plugins are an effort to use the comfort and increased productivity one has when developing within Eclise, and offer these advantegeous to the WidgetServer Developers. At its most basic, anyone could have already been using Eclipse to develop WidgetServer based applications. Eclipse comes with a very capable Java and XML editor set. These have been extended and implemented differently where needed. A full WidgetServer Perspective for development which extends the features found in the basic Eclipse install, plus features from the JDT and WST projects is presented. New views have been added to aid in WidgetServer specific development, plus its own 'Builder' to help with compile time issues (finding some errors before running it). A wizard for new projects which sets up all the required libraries, project structure, channel type, creates the main GUI file and opens it in the editor. A 'Preview' view that allows the loading of the Jetty server into the current project and viewing the current GUI file in the Browser. Quick-Fixes, Drag-n-Drop for the Widgets, modifiable Widget Templates, Build collected information of registered types and listeners, and all the capabilities and features that one has when working within Eclipse are also present. For more information please look at the Features or download and try it out.

WHO?

The development of these plugins has been sponsored by:
C1 SetCon
Developer: Thomas Boshell
with support from the WidgetServer developer: Dirk von der Weiden