Eclipse GUI bundle

Question

I am building an application whose GUI should look like eclipse. Since Eclipse uses Equinox OSGi framework, is it possible to reuse the bundle responsible for Eclipse GUI in my application? If so, which is the bundle which is responsible for Eclipse GUI? Any help is appreciated..!

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 16 '12 at 13:25

I believe you are making a wrong assumption: Out of the many bundles (a.k.a. plugins) that an Eclipse installation normally consists of, there is not a single bundle responsible for the overall GUI. Instead it is a large chunck of dependent bundles for the SWT graphics library, the views, workbench and so.

So if you want to create something that looks like Eclipse and behaves like Eclipse, then you want to reuse many of those plugins and you probably want to read further on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform, which is the smallest set of reusable bundles for creating Eclipse-based applications.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 16 '12 at 12:19

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For building Eclipse-alike application you can of course extend the Eclipse platform using an own plugin. However OSGi can be very complex.

If you only want the general look of Eclipse you just use SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit. This toolkit provides the GUI elements and is responsible for the look of Eclipse.

answered Jun 16 '12 at 12:19

Robert

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OSGi is not very complex if you have modular code. It are the non-modular java hacks like using statics (global variables!) and loading class via strings that run into OSGi's modularity boundaries. – Peter Kriens Jun 17 '13 at 06:22

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:25

This is possible but a bit complex. Download the archives for SWT (basic building blocks like labels, buttons and tables) and possibly JFace (high level UI components) and add the JARs to your classpath.

One way to get them is to download Eclipse for your platform; that gives you the JFace JARs. SWT is a bit more complex because it contains one JAR per supported platform; you can find the JARs for all platforms in the "Delta Pack" (download for Eclipse 4.2)

When writing your application, you will need to determine the platform and add the correct SWT JAR to your classpath. Here is the code to do that: Create cross platform Java SWT Application

Eclipse GUI bundle

3 Answers3