UFaceKit

Since the 3.3 release, Eclipse ships an actively developed and extended data binding framework (Eclipse Data Binding) that eases the development of UI applications backed by a model. At the time of the 3.4 release of Eclipse, the Eclipse Data Binding framework had been adopted by many RCP applications and new libraries supporting model implementations (EMF) besides JavaBeans(tm). So far, we have not seen support for other widget toolkits (such as for example Swing, GWT, etc.) although the main framework is designed to make this possible. This means that the Eclipse Data Binding framework cannot currently be used in applications which are not using SWT and JFace, although there is no good reason not to do so.

UFacekit was started in December 2007 by James Strachan and Tom Schindl (Angelo Zerr and Kenneth Westelinck joined the project later) with the following set of targets:

• Promote reuse of rich UI code across Eclipse (JFace/SWT), GWT and Swing runtimes by providing a facade around different UI-Technologies.
• Promote the use of Eclipse Data Binding within GWT and Swing communities by providing Eclipse Data Binding Observable implementations for them.
• Make new applications stacks accessible to EMF (e.g. Swing).
• Simplify rich UI development by providing simpler facades and powerful binding.