“This article walks through the steps for using the Graphical Editing Framework. Rather than finishing each step in its entirety, we’ll use a subset of your application’s model and get that working first. For example, we might initially ignore connections or focus on just a subset of the types of graphical elements in your application. Next, learn what other technologies are available to add graphical editing to your applications. In the past, stand-alone GEF used to be the only option for graphical editing in Eclipse, but this has changed as Eclipse has evolved.”
“Hello World” in 10000 lines of code and 10 XML Files.
I really wonder how familiar you are with the Eclipse platform and GEF in particular; or how fast you could implement similar functionality without using such a platform. I found working with EMF and GEF a really effective way of building rich client applications with such needs..
Just a joke!
Seriously, though, I do think _sometimes_ java developers tend to take the abstraction concept to extemes. If I might butcher a famous Perl quote,
“We make the hard things possible, and the easy things just as hard.”
Even the simplest Java apps often are full of Listeners and Consumers and Observers…
Sometimes I think it is a secret conspiracy among all the Computer Science teachers around the world. You WILL use design patterns or perish!!
Having said that, I understand the problem with people who go too far the other direction – the “code cowboys”. I am currently a Java developer, but I also have been a Visual C++ and Visual Basic developer. I’ve seen enough spaghetti code from the “Git’r Done” folks to fill an Olive Garden!
Oh, come on. It doesn’t take 10,000 lines of code to create a ‘Hello World’ application. It only takes 9,993 lines of code.
Seriously, I once started to become a Java developer, but I gave up when I realized I didn’t have the stamina to figure it all out. That’s not a knock to Java, I just wasn’t serious enough about programming to tackle Java (or C/C++). Both are intimidating to me. I do like Pascal though, but it doesn’t get much support.
I still do some simple work in Java, but I’ll leave the program development to those who have some skills.