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Posts Tagged with “visualization”

GEF3D

Who likes pretty pictures and visualization!? I do!

Check out the GEF3D project:

Kind of cool huh!? The concept is quite cute, GEF3D extends GEF by having 3D enabled draw and controller classes. So, instead of drawing 2D figures (e.g., Draw2D), you can now draw 3D figures! Another cool aspect of the project is that existing GEF-based 2D editors can be embedded into 3D editors with minimal effort.

I’m currently working with the GEF3D project leads to move this project over to Eclipse.org… look for a project proposal soon (GEF3D is already under the EPL). Let me know if you support this project, I’ll put your name down as one of the interested parties in the proposal.

On the whole, I’m excited to see more visualization technologies at Eclipse.org, with Zest coming in last year, GEF3D would make a very nice addition.

Eclipse Code Swarm

For those who had their fun with Wordle already, check out code swarm:

Code swarm visualizes the history of commits in a software project. What’s really neat is that one of the projects that code swarm profiled was Eclipse (SDK). So if you look at the code swarm visualization of the Eclipse SDK, you get to see some cool things. In the beginning, you can see DJ and John Arthorne battling to enter the CVS nexus first:

After that, a lot more people join the Eclipse party:

I’m a big fan of visualization so it’s always cool to come across things that try to give us any insight into the crazy world of open-source development. For more fun, you can look at the other visualizations on the code swarm site and compare them to the Eclipse one.

ispace

I came across the ispace project today which looks like a new EPL’d visualization toolkit. Just throwing this out there for people who are interested in visualization in Eclipse. Maybe ispace and the Zest project could get together and produce something cool.

Visualization in the Eclipse SDK

After talking to a few people (while imbibing some beers) and hearing Jeff Norris at the BlueSky BOF complain about how hard it is to visualize dependencies in RCP projects… I realized that in the base Eclipse SDK, we lack a fundamental and easy way for people to create visualizations (think Java2D). I think this is part of the reason we don’t see more visualization in Eclipse.

In PDE, we have an incubator currently setup where we (thanks Ian!) are working on some visualization tools. The technology that we use to make this happen is called Zest. You can think of Zest as a lightweight MVC type wrapper on top of Draw2D (similar to how JFace operates on top of SWT). With Zest, you simply bring your model and work with the familiar constructs of content and label providers. I mean, it’s really easy to come up with a graphical editor (I will post a simple example in a future blog entry).

What do people think? Do we need to strive to push this type of functionality into the SDK so more people will be able to use it without having to download some add-ins? If so, let’s file a bug and discuss it.