Here’s a nice addition to Riena’s TableRidget: you can now mark a table-row as incorrect.

This is done with an RowErrorMessageMarker. When hovering over the marked row, the corresponding error message will be shown in a tooltip.

IMarker marker = new RowErrorMessageMarker("An error message...", zorro);
tableRidget.addMarker(marker);
// to remove:
tableRidget.removeMarker(marker);

Full snippet here. This is shipping with the upcoming Riena 2.0 M6.

Tags: eclipse ui, riena, swt, tips

I’ve spend the last few days adjusting the Ridget layer in Riena, to make it work with Eclipse RAP and Eclipse RCP. We call this process “single-sourcing” (EclipseCon tutorial).

Ridgets wrap around standard SWT / RWT controls to provide additional functionality and a better API. One example that you can see below: Ridgets have “markers”, which tag a control as mandatory, wrong or read-only and change the control’s behavior accordingly.

It’s worth mentioning that all three screenshots run from the same code. The only difference is the target environment used (RAP or RCP).

Ridgets styled with RAP's "business" theme

Ridgets styled with RAP's "classic" theme

Ridgets in a regular RCP application

Once this work is completed the Ridget API will be usable for RAP applications as well.

To stay informed about this effort:

• CC yourself to Bug 302893, and
• come to our EclipseCon talk “Riena 2.0 - New & Noteworthy“

Tags: eclipse rap, eclipsecon, riena

We recently had a workshop on redView with the developers of the project, probably many of you know ekke. We wanted to evaluate it and gain a better understanding if we could use it in the context of a project in the insurance space.

redView looks pretty promising, and although personally I am not a big fan of modeling and code generation there might be a sweet spot for redView for people who have tons of forms to fill in data.

One really nice thing about redView is that they created a detailled install instruction (a yoxos profile could probably help here), and a bunch of demos to get started.

http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/examples
http://redview.wordpress.com/howto/installation/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/redview/files/

P.S: The obligatory question about single sourcing redView has been discussed, and as redView is EMF + Riena it looks feasible to get redViews working in RAP. Even the visual form designer imposes no hurdles that could not be overcome (plain SWT, no GEF).

Tags: eclipse rap, modeling, rcp, riena

We proudly present Riena 2.0 M5 – the first release in the 2.0 stream.  As you can see by the long New & Noteworthy, we have been very active in last six weeks. Read on for my five favorite new things:

1. Pluggable Marker Decorations

The new BorderMarkerSupport draws red-borders around a widget and replaces the standard ControlDecoration. You can select either error decoration style via the Look-and-Feel settings.

2. Enhanced Master/Details Widget

The Master/Details Widget automatically links a table with the details area on the bottom (or top). It is used heavily by some of Riena’s consumers. As a result we have been receiving good feedback and have added several requested features on this milestone:

• nicer border (includes button area, separates table from buttons with a single line)
• API to participate in the life-cycle (before / after selection, apply, remove, new)
• API to ’suggest’ a new entry – it will show in the details area and Apply will enable
• API to tweak the margin and spacing of the Master/Details widget

3. Image Button Widget

The SWT Buttons have a system-defined look that is hard to customize (for example the background color cannot be changed). Riena’s ImageButton Widget emulates a button using three images (standard, hover, pushed state).

4. Multiple Default Buttons per Controller

Riena’s Controllers have a new API that supports several default buttons per controller. The default button has a blue glow when enabled. In that state it will automatically be pushed when the user hits ENTER (anywhere).

5. Controller Testing

Controller testing is now very straightforward and has been decoupled from the UI (widgets). Just subclass AbstractSubModuleControllerTest to get started. In addition your controller has to use the new API getRidget(Class, String) instead of getRidget(String). The package org.eclipse.riena.client.controller.test in the org.eclipse.riena.tests bundle has several examples.

Read the New & Noteworthy for additional details on these items.

Tags: helios, milestone, riena

We Riena committers smoothly shipped a fresh Riena Milestone last Friday, this time 1.2.0.M3 (download). Here’s the New & Noteworthy and the list of resolved items.

For the curious, here is the schedule leading towards the December release:

• 12/04 – 1.2.0 RC1
• 12/11 – 1.2.0 RC2
• 12/15 – 1.2.0

After that the work will start concentrating on the summer release, which is part of the Helios release train.

Tags: helios, milestone, riena

If you are at the Eclipse Summit Europe this week, here are some interesting talks about the work going on in and around Eclipse Riena:

* Eclipse RunTime Tutorial, Tue 9:00-12:00, Seminarräume 2-4 – This tutorial connects the dots between different runtime technologies, such as Equinox, Riena, RAP and EclipseLink

* Eclipse Riena Project – Overview and a new UI concept for RCP applications, Wed 11:20-12:00, Seminarräume 2-4 – This overview of Riena focuses on the framework’s UI concepts. Learn how to use navigation, styling and filtering to build better RCP applications.

* SWT Platform on QT – Overview and Demo, Thu 16:00-16:20, Seminarräume 2-4 – I’m very curious about this session. The screenshots I have seen looked very exciting. And the promise of taking advantage of QT’s extensive customization capabilities and build-in CSS support is appealing. Personally I’ve found SWT to be quite restrictive when it comes to styling and theming, so I am interested in all approaches that expand what you can do.

Kind regards,
Elias.

PS: I’m not attending this year, but several of my Riena colleagues will be there.

Tags: eclipse ui, ESE, riena

The Riena committers have just done it again: Riena 1.2.0.M2 is now out the door (download). Here’s the New & Noteworthy and the issues fixed in this milestone. Read on for my personal favorites:

• New ridgets: ILinkRidget, IBrowserRidget, ITraverseRidget (for SWT’s Slider, Scale and Spinner widgets). Thanks to Florian from Redview for these contributions (snippets)
• IComboRidget now supports  CCombo: the CCombo widget works much better with our marker framework, since it supports different background colors (the regular combo does not!). Markers use background colors to point out required or incorrect data. Check out the new CCombo demo in the playground.
  
• MasterDetails improvements: (a) the MasterDetails widget now has an ‘auto apply’ mode, meaning that any changes done in the details area in the bottom will instantly be applied back to the original model in the table (snippet)
  (b) if you’ve edited the details and navigate away or hit the ‘New’ button, you’ll be warned that you’re about to discard your changes. If you find it annoying, you can also turn it off.
• Automatically synchronize enablement state of a label and another widget: Riena now has a mechanism that keeps the enabled-state of a label and another widget in lock-step. Example: you have a Label with the id “labelName” and a Text widget with the id “name”. If the text field is disabled, the label will be disabled too. The default strategy looks for the “label” prefix to associate two widgets with each other (i.e. labelXYZ <-> XYZ). However you can use the labelfinderstrategy extension point to provide a different strategy, if desired.

Kind regards,
Elias.

Tags: eclipse ui, helios, milestone, riena

Cool logo and cool sessions at ESE.

At ESE in a couple weeks we are running both an EclipseRT tutorial and symposium. A full day of runtime fun!  No idea what I’m talking about? EclipseRT is the community of people at Eclipse that are creating and using Eclipse technology in runtime (i.e., non-tooling) scenarios.

Turns out that there are a great number of projects involved and not just the ones in the RT top-level project.  BIRT, EMF, GEF, … all have runtime elements. The RT project itself hosts such leading runtime technology as Equinox (the OSGi and JSR232 reference implementation) EclipseLink (the JPA2 reference implementation), Jetty (very popular embeddable web server) and a host of other great projects like RAP, Riena, Swordfish, ECF, eRCP etc. No wonder we need a whole day to talk about all this.

The day starts with a 4 hour EclipseRT tutorial covering the Equinox, OSGi, server side use, tooling, RAP and single sourcing, Riena and EclipseLink. The tutorial will build on input from previous symposia where nearly everyone commented on the need for a good end to end example of Eclipse in the runtime world. We are using Toast, the example application from the upcoming OSGi and Equinox book and now part of the Eclipse Examples project.

After a full morning of learning, we’ll have a bit of an unconference style symposium to talk about issues and topics in the EclipseRT world. While the direction will depend significantly on who shows up, we hope to cover architecture and how promote integration and adoption, community issues such as release trains, repo organization etc and experience reports from the real world.

Presumably this will all be followed by a number of frosty beverages.

Check out the event wiki page for more information and evolving discussion topics.

Tags: eclipse rap, equinox, events, OSGi, riena, syndicate

The Fellowship of Riena just released 1.2.0.M1. (download). We committers have fixed 40+ issues and added a couple of new features. Below are my personal favorites.

Improved support for message markers. Multiple validation rules and validation messages are now shown correctly (snippet):

The new IListRidget simplifies binding to  lists of elements with one column. This is a bit simpler than using a ITableRidget (snippet).

Easier listening for selection changes using an ISelectionListener on ITableRidget, IListRidget, ITreeRidget, ITreeTableRidget, ISingleChoiceRidget, IMultipleChoiceRidget.

Better keyboard navigation. We have added several new shortcuts. Some examples:

• Next / Previous navigation element – Up / Down in the navigation tree
• Next / Previous Module – Ctrl-Down / Ctrl-Up
• Next / Previous SubApplication – Ctrl-PgDn / Ctrl-PgUp
• Close Module / ModuleGroup – Ctrl-W / Ctrl-Shift-W
• Focus on Navigation / Workarea – F6 / F7
• Focus on Window Menu – F10 (windows only)
• Quit Application – Alt+F4 (windows only)

and  SubApplication titles now support mnemonics for easier access via the keyboard:

Here’s the complete New & Noteworthy.

Kind regards,
Elias.

PS: SubApplication, Module, ModuleGroup are explained here.

Tags: eclipse ui, helios, milestone, riena

Starting out with Eclipse Riena?  I hope you find my one-picture-summary of the Riena UI and navigation useful:

Conceptually the window is divided into the navigation tree on the left - showing a navigation model – and the work area on the right - showing the view that is currently active. Other window areas are the menu bar, the coolbar and the status bar.

The navigation tree shows the navigation model of the current SubApplication and can change during run-time (for example elements can be added / removed). Conceptually it is a tree constructed like this:

1 Riena Application  - root of the navigation tree; non-interactive
> 1-n SubApplications – each sub application has a clickable tab in the top part of the window
>> 1-n ModuleGroups – groups several modules together; non-interactive
>>> 1-n Modules – has a title (blue background) and 1-n SubModules
>>>> 1-n SubModules – is associated with a View and Controller. When a SubModule becomes selected the corresponding View is shown in the work area. SubModules can be nested. If module has just one SubModule it is not shown.

As you can see, Riena steps away a bit from perspectives, views, editors in favor of a task oriented interaction (side note: underneath this we use views and perspectives, and we support integration of regular views). For example you could have a SubApplication called “Customers”, with a Search Module and additional Modules for each of the customers you are currently editing:

For the full details read the excellent ‘Riena Navigation‘ page on the Riena wiki. The wiki explains this in more detail and shows how to create the navigation structure through Java code or the plugin.xml file.

Tags: eclipse ui, riena