Eclipse e4 highlights - Featuring XWT

The e4 project, currently in the incubation phase, is the next generation of Eclipse. Eclipse V4.0 is to be released in 2010. Building on current Eclipse and OSGi technology as a solid foundation, a major goal of e4 is to make it easier for you to write and reuse components. There will be a uniform pervasive platform across computing environments (Web/RIA, desktop, server, cloud, embedded), and more technologies that can be seamlessly integrated into Eclipse. Look for:

• An enhanced programming model based on OSGi that provides better isolation of software components.
• XWT, a new toolkit or framework, for defining the structure of SWT/JFace applications declaratively.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to present the UI components without explicitly modifying the application code.
• A new port of the standard widget toolkit (SWT), called SWT browser edition, which allows existing SWT applications to be executed in the browser's Flash player.
• Software written in JavaScript to execute in the Eclipse runtime.

In this article, learn some of the major features in e4. You will also create an example application to use e4's new XWT interface and data-binding feature. XWT is a declarative toolkit for writing SWT/JFace UI components in XML.