For those who have used Eclipse Forms in their projects, I’m sure a common request was to include some type of fancy validation using the lovely message manager in Forms. If you use JFace Databinding also in that project, you probably wrote some code to help link databinding’s validation status to the Forms message manager. If you believe this should be common code available in the SDK, please voice your comments on this bug. Better yet, if you have code to donate, feel free to do that also.
Posts Tagged with “forms”
Pushing Pixels
By Chris Aniszczyk
Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Most people can’t. Only a few people like Kevin McGuire who like to nitpick and subscribe to the religion of color can spot the problem quickly. I call these people pixel pushers. In my opinion, these are the people that make Eclipse look good due to their attention to detail.
Now getting back to what’s wrong, here’s a hint:
Oh my eyes! When I saw this it hit me like a ton of bricks and I had to fix it immediately.
Why does this happen? Well, there’s the unfortunate situation when Eclipse Forms sections are given text clients with things like toolbar managers to add cool icons. This results in text clients taller than their title text so things grow accordingly causing adjacent sections to possibly not align. If you would like to learn more about this problem, check out this unpublished article on some new things in Eclipse Forms 3.3 by one of my favorite people in Toronto, Adam Archer.
Here’s how it should look like:
Ah, much better!
What’s the fix? Align adjacent sections using the text client height difference:
section2.descriptionVerticalSpacing = section1.getTextClientHeightDifference();
Does this make me a pixel pusher too?
Dirty Words and New Articles
By Chris Aniszczyk
While reading the Eclipse newsgroups this morning, I came across someone using one of my dirty words. Hrmmm passivation, I wonder what their background is as a developer.
Oh, there are some new Eclipse articles out. The first is pretty snazzy article on eJFace which is part of the eRCP project. It’s like JFace, but for more constrained environments. The other article is a simple introduction I did for Eclipse Forms to help spread the word.
The next stop on the article train for me is a two-part article series with Benjamin Muskalla about the Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). The first part will be a basic introduction to RAP including some demos, setting up your environment for development and a simple example to work with. The second part will include more advanced topics like theming and creating your own widgets for use within RAP. Look for these articles in a couple weeks to coincide with the launch of RAP!
On a side note, I noticed the RAP team posted the famous RCP Mail example as an online demo.
Vive le Forms!
By Chris Aniszczyk
The 3.3M5 release of Eclipse is looking exciting (hopefully Ed Merks will not cause an M5a release), especially with the new changes surrounding Forms. Just giving people some heads up here and hopefully this will increase the adoption of Forms in the future.