Design And Implementation Of A Visual Interface Designer Based On Eclipse

The requirements and dependencies of software products have been greatly enhanced by all walks of life with the advancement of social information construction, leading to the demand for application development increased. Especially the design of graphical user interface, it requires cumbersome code editing, spends a lot of time and can only be seen the interface effect in the run-time. One reason why did the extension of program development cycle and the decrease of development efficiency is that the design of the interface is not the difficult points but takes up plenty of time. With the rise of visual interface development tools, the design of the interface is simplified and the program development cycle has been greatly shortened. However, the existing visual development tools have some limitations, especially visual development tools based C language, lack an integrated development environment to integrate interface development and business logic development together in Linux system.The definition of visual interface development is that the users design graphical interface by editing graphics widgets. Visual interface development can keep the display effect of editing stage synchronous with the final run effect, as the principle of "what you see is what you get." In allusion to the needs of the GTK+graphics library application development in Linux, this paper expands the relevant extension points provided by the Eclipse plug-ins based on the Eclipse platform, designs and implements visual Eclipse plug-ins, and integrates it into the Eclipse platform to make Eclipse provide visual interface development environment of C language based on GTK+graphics library. Visual Eclipse plug-in mainly includes project management module and visual interface development environment module. The function of project management module is mainly to provide project creation interface to create visual projects, and increase project wizards and template on the Eclipse platform for visual projects. Project management module is aim at adding a visual project option in the original C project wizard and defining visual project template by extending the relevant extension points of the CDT plug-in. So that visual project will have been created with the default UI file, C files, skeletal code, and the configuration of the corresponding development environment variables and the dynamic link libraries.The function of visual interface development environment module is to establish a visual interface development platform for the users. Users can get the visible interface effect only by dragging diagrams used mouse. Visual interface development environment module uses GEF framework under the PDE development environment of the Eclipse platform. Interface display needs to interact with GTK+graphics library through JNI technology, and store the graphic user interface information in XML format which comply with the GTK specification. Users can edit the attribute information of the graphical interface elements in the part of property view. Graphical interface associates with the main program through the signal properties. Users can see the hierarchical structure of the interface elements, and do simple operations like deleting, redo and undo to interface elements in the outline view.