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/*******************************************************************************
* Copyright (c) 2015 Eclipse Foundation and others.
* All rights reserved. This program and the accompanying materials
* are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0
* which accompanies this distribution, and is available at
* http://eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html
*
* Contributors:
* Eric Poirier (Eclipse Foundation) - Initial implementation
*******************************************************************************/
?>
<h1 class="article-title"><?php echo $pageTitle; ?></h1>
<h3>What is e(fx)clipse</h3>
<h4>Tooling</h4>
<p>e(fx)clipse is an Eclipse.org project that provides JavaFX
capabilities for the Eclipse IDE, so that people can easily develop
JavaFX applications inside their favorite IDE.</p>
<p>To make the development process as smooth as possible, it provides
the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>automatic detection of JavaFX inside JDK7 and JDK8</li>
<li>specialized CSS-Editor who knows all custom JavaFX’ attributes</li>
<li>specialized FXML-Editor on top of WST-XML including a live
preview</li>
<li>wizards to bootstrap standard JavaFX projects and OSGi enabled
JavaFX projects</li>
</ul>
<h4>Runtime</h4>
<p>Additionally, e(fx)clipse also provides runtime components to
develop OSGi enabled JavaFX applications, including otherwise
missing features when using JavaFX in an OSGi environment.</p>
<p>Besides providing single components to develop pure OSGi
applications, it also provides a complete framework implementation
on top of the core Eclipse 4 technologies (modelled application and
DI container), allowing people to develop RCP applications with any
level of complexity.</p>
<h3>Tooling</h3>
<h4>Basic IDE integration</h4>
<p>In Java 7, JavaFX is part of the default JDK/JRE install, but
surprisingly it is not found on any of the default classpaths, so
e(fx)clipse comes with a helper ClasspathLibrary that fixes this
problem. In Java 8, JavaFX is within the extension classpath, but
because the source code is not part of the ordinary JDK src.zip,
stepping through the JavaFX source code using JDT would not be
possible for the developer while debugging. e(fx)clipse works around
this limitation, and so developers can step through JavaFX code
while debugging and are shown JavaFX related JavaDoc when hovering
over JavaFX APIs in their Java editor.</p>
<img
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/article3.1.png"
width="600" alt="button class" />
<br>
<h4>JavaFX CSS Editor</h4>
<p>CSS is a very important technology for people developing JavaFX
applications, because all the theming is done through
CSS-Stylesheets. JavaFX’ CSS-Attributes are quite different from the
known HTML CSS-Attributes, instead it comes with a huge set of
custom properties, some working similar to their web counterparts,
others completely custom.</p>
<p>e(fx)clipse provides a very smart CSS-Editor that knows exactly,
what attribute can be applied to which element definition. It is
even clever enough to detect the used JavaFX version and shows
different proposals based upon the targeted runtime.</p>
<img
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/article3.2.png"
width="600" alt="background fills" />
<br>
<h3>FXML Editor</h3>
<p>Next to Java and CSS, the 3rd important technology used by JavaFX
developers is FXML. FXML is a declarative language to define JavaFX
UIs. While Oracle provides a WYSIWYG tool called SceneBuilder, many
developers still prefer to the define their UIs by directly editing
the FXML-File.</p>
<p>e(fx)clipse’s specialized FXML-Editor supports Java editor like
features like auto completion, javadoc hovers, quick fixes and much
more.</p>
<img
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/article3.3.png"
width="250" alt="button" />
<br>
<h4>FXGraph Editor</h4>
<p>FXGraph is a custom DSL provided only by e(fx)clipse, that removes
much of the noise when using FXML to define UIs. Its syntax looks
similar to JSON and “compiles” FXML so that no additional runtime
libraries are needed.</p>
<img
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/article3.4.png"
width="600" alt="button" />
<br>
<p>
More information on FXGraph can be found in the e(fx)clipse wiki: <a
target="_blank"
href="http://wiki.eclipse.org/Efxclipse/Tooling/FXGraph">http://wiki.eclipse.org/Efxclipse/Tooling/FXGraph</a>.
<h4>Embedded & Mobile support</h4>
<p>Although not backed by an Oracle JVM, JavaFX applications can run
on Android (Davlik) and iOS (AOT with RoboVM) devices. e(fx)clipse
provides a preview mode for mobile resolutions and a small runtime
framework that provides basic transition effects between screens.</p>
<p>Another important issue when running on resource constrained
devices, ie. with less powerful CPUs, is that the overhead of
constructing UIs from FXML is too big. Because of that, e(fx)clipse
provides a FXML to Java “compiler” (or better converter), that runs
at build time.</p>
<h3>Runtime</h3>
<h4>Basic runtime components</h4>
<p>JavaFX comes with a default set of layout containers, but people
switching from SWT to JavaFX are probably used to the layout
containers used in SWT. e(fx)clipse provides layout panels that use
the same layout algorithms as known from the SWT world.</p>
<h4>EMF-Edit integration</h4>
<p>EMF itself has support to populate structured SWT controls like
Lists, Tables, Trees and TreeTables with EMF objects. e(fx)clipse
provides EMF edit hooks that can be used by JavaFX controls like
ListView, TableView and TreeView. JavaFX8 added a TreeTableView that
is supported as well.</p>
<h4>OSGi integration</h4>
<p>JavaFX does not work out of the box in OSGi. On Java 7, it was not
found on any classpath and even though it is on the extension
classpath in Java 8, it is not part of an EE. So Equinox will not
wire JavaFX packages by default. e(fx)clipse provides an Equinox
Adapter Hook, that integrates JavaFX into OSGi, so that developers
don’t have to worry about this issue, too.</p>
<h4>e4 integration</h4>
<p>The Eclipse 4 framework was designed to be widget agnostic since
day one. e(fx)clipse comes with a full implementation of the widget
specific parts of the Eclipse 4 framework. So people can easily
implement JavaFX applications of any complexity on top of the core
Eclipse 4 concepts, like modelled applications, dependency injection
and OSGi.</p>
<img
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/article3.5.png"
width="600" alt="details" />
<br>
<div class="bottomitem">
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-12">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-sm-8">
<img class="author-picture"
src="/community/eclipse_newsletter/2014/january/images/tom75.jpg"
alt="tom schindl" />
</div>
<div class="col-sm-16">
<p class="author-name">
Tom Schindl<br />
<a target="_blank" href="http://www.bestsolution.at">BestSolution.at</a>
</p>
<ul class="author-link">
<li><a target="_blank" href="http://tomsondev.bestsolution.at">Blog</a></li>
<li><a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/tomsontom">Twitter</a></li>
<!--<li><a target="_blank" href="https://plus.google.com/b/107434916948787284891/109870559592385719776/posts">Google +</a></li>-->
</ul>
</div>
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