Chapter 3. Creating JFace Viewers

JFace – the Eclipse model/view/controller architecture

In the last chapter, we looked at the basic building blocks of SWT, which provide a glue layer between the native operating system's widgets and Java. We will now look at JFace, which builds upon SWT to provide an MVC architecture as well as many of the common widgets used by Eclipse.

In this chapter, we shall:

• Create a view for showing hierarchical data
• Use image, font, and color resources
• Generate styled text
• Sort and filter entries in viewers
• Add double-click actions
• Create a view for showing tabular data
• Synchronize selections between views