Research Of Automatically Generating GEF Graphical Editor

GEF (Graphical Editing Framework) is the one of the most attractive frameworks in the Eclipse Tools Project, it can be used to provide a graphical editing function of a model and thereby elevate the user experience. At present a number of the eclipse plug-in produces were based on the framework when they were constructed. There are typical applications such as UML class diagram editor, the graphical process design tool and the graphical database structure design tool, etc. Even the visual graphs editor in some software development platform was developed also by using GEF framework. But its comprehensive structure of design doom the complexity of GEF application, and there a large amount of concepts in GEF framework and the class names and interface names are similar, handling way of graph editor is especially intricate. Even if construct a simple GEF application example we should also include half a dozen packages and dozens of a classes. This will determine the period GEF of study is longer. Therefore, it is inevitable that there is a problem of longer development lifecycle and higher development cost when construct a GEF application.In addition to this, the difficulties of editor maintaining, according to the different editor to write a lot of similar codes is also a serious problem.In response to these questions, this article will carry out the research of GEF graphical editor automatically generates.The research of GEF graphical editor automatically generates makes use of the Automatic Programming ideas -design a program system that it accepts the procedural requirements on the design goal of achieving a very high level description as its input, and automatically generate a will accomplish the goals of the specific procedures; Practice has proved that, for programming issues, First to produce a wrong solution whose cost is not too high, and then modify it is usually much higher efficiency than to insist that The first solution obtained has not any defect. This paper use EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) which has function of directly generate model code to construct the model, thus, depending on the different meta model can quickly build a target graphics editor. And provide automatic notification of model changes to the code, changes of meta model can be reflected to the source code of the editor timely. At the same time, the changes of codes can also be reflected to the meta model, which reduced required workload to adapt the model changes or code changes. This solved the GEF's graphics editor need to re-design and development when Changes in the structure of meta model, and Long development cycle, high cost, difficult maintenance of the editor issues, Thus effectively reducing the amount of code writing and to improve software productivity and software product quality.