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From: Sylvain Wallez <sylvain@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Multipage Editors for Eclipse plugin
Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 16:06:26 +0200
Organization: Anyware Technologies
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Ross Gardler wrote:

> Anil Ramnanan wrote:
>
>> I am continuing work on the Eclipse plugin and I would like to 
>> convert the current editors to multipage editors. Basically, a 
>> multpage editor will contain two (or more)  views. My idea is to have 
>> a view for the source code as well as a view for the tree 
>> view/content outline. The advantage of a multipage editor is that it 
>> make it easier to implement features such as links to Eclipse's built 
>> in property editor. Also, the current editor can only open a file 
>> located in a specific location e.g the site.xml file has to be in 
>> src/documentation/content/xdocs. If the location of this file were to 
>> move in the future then the current editor would not be bale to see 
>> the file. Anyy comments on this ?
>
>
> +1
>
> I was going to do the very same thing if/when I found the time.
>
> I would recommend that you take a look at the Lepido project [1]. They 
> have a cool tool called Axe.
>
> "The use of AXE allows to very quickly develop new editors by 
> providing a declarative approach to building form-oriented editors 
> without requiring an intimate knowledge of JFace, and by associating 
> form widgets to XPath expressions in the XML document, thus making it 
> easy to bidirectionally bind forms to the target source file.
>
> The AXE component has been proposed for inclusion as a new WTP 
> component and according the the latest WTP PMC report will be 
> eventually included in WTP 1.1. In the meantime AXE will reside in the 
> Lepido project before moving to the org.eclipse.wtp namespace." (from 
> http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/eclipse-lepido/main.html)
>
> I've played a little with this in their Cocoon Forms editor within 
> Lepdio - it's cool!


Yep. Basically, AXE (which used to be "Anyware's XML Editor" and is now 
"Advanced XML Editor") adds form-based tabs to the webtools XML editor.

These form-based tabs are defined declaratively using a XUL-like 
language which creates the widgets and maps them to XPath expressions in 
the XML document. All views are automatically synchronised without 
having to save the file.

> Another benfit of using that will be that we can start to bridge the 
> two communities, I personally believe Forrest should be leveraged as 
> the documentation generation system within Lepido and our eclipse 
> plugin is the way to realise that.


+1 for this. Actually, I feel a bit alone in my Lepido corner and lack 
time to push it forward. Contributions are welcome!

Sylvain

-- 
Sylvain Wallez                        Anyware Technologies
http://people.apache.org/~sylvain     http://www.anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member     Research & Technology Director