The loosely coupling of different application components is one of the most characteristic feature of Eclipse that should also be used by a RCP-developer. Especially because of the interfaces that are defined in eclipse with the extension-framework, you’re able to deliver products that are flexible and easy to customize. Therefore Eclipse gives you all needed tools and formalism to take with them.

If you’re developing an application based on the Eclipse-framework, you’re using primarily the extension-points provided by eclipse itself. The concept of the “late binding” can be and shall be used by a developer of a new eclipse application. Therefore the mechanism is really simple. You’re defining an extension point with a minimalist interface and extending the framework with your interface-implementation.

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Do you know the palette from GEF?- It is THE Creation Tool for graphical Editors based on GEF. Unfortunately the requirement is often to drag and drop already created objects into the graphical viewer, e.g from a navigation view, or another JFace-Viewer. Therefore you have to implement your own Drag’n Drop mechanism that is also compatible with the EditPart concept and your Commands. Today I want to show you a way how to drag elements from a TableViewer and drop them on my EditParts. Before dropping the elements you have the possibility to hook in your own code for showing an additional wizard/dialog or if you want to manipulate/replace/adapt the dragged model-object. I have written a small manager and that decides when and how a drop is allowed and how to process the dropped data.

Let me tell the truth. It’s not as difficult as it sounds.

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When using a ScrolledComposite, I always had the problem, that I couldn’t use the wheel of my mouse for vertical scrolling. I was really annoyed about it. But now I have found a really simple solution.

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