Graphical Editing Framework: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 07:27, 13 February 2016

Revision as of 07:32, 13 February 2016

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The '''Graphical Editing Framework''' '''(GEF)''' is an [[Eclipse (software)|Eclipse]] project that provides framework componentsand toend-user realizecomponents richrelated to graphical applications.

The project was initially contributed to Eclipse by IBM in 2002, consisting of two components: Draw2d, a 2D-visualization component based on the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), as well as GEF (MVC), a related model-view-controller component that can be used to realize graphical editors as part of an Eclipse Rich Client Product (RCP) application. ItGEF (MVC) is inter alia used by the [[Graphical Modeling Framework|Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF)]], which combines the [[Eclipse Modeling Framework|Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)]] and GEF to create the code for both the data model and the graphical editor. Zest, a graph-based visualization toolkit, was added as a third project component in 2007. It can be used to realize views for visualization of graph-like data structures inside Eclipse applications.

Since 2004, when GEF 3.0 was released, only compatible changes have been applied to the framework's application programming interface (API). A new major revision of the framework, GEF 4.0, has been developed in parallel to the maintenance of the GEF 3.x code base by the project team since 2010. It is a complete redesign that is much more modular (consisting of 9 components), uses JavaFX instead of SWT as underlying rendering framework, and can be used also independent of the Eclipse RCP platform. Commonly referred to as GEF4, it was initially released in version 0.1.0 (with still provisional API) in June 2015 with the Eclipse Mars release.