Question

Which component was used to create the CLOVER ETL GUI? I have some possibilities:

  • Zest
  • Draw2D
  • GEF

I need to create a tool that a user can create a graph.

Thanks

Was it helpful?

Solution

I'm head of development of CloverETL. The graph editor of CloverETL Designer is built with GEF, which uses Draw2D underneath. So we get in contact with both technologies - GEF for most of the functionality, Draw2D for more low level drawing stuff.

For a new project you might think about using GMF (Graphical Modelling Framework) which is a higher level abstraction on top of GEF and EMF. But from my experience you'll need to touch the low level bits (GEF, Draw2D) even with GMF. We don't use GMF in Designer because Designer started long before GMF was ready.

OTHER TIPS

I don't know Clover ETL in detail, and the open source code does not seem to contain the graphical editor, so I cannot tell for sure the technologies used for the graphical editor, but looking at the screenshots it seems to be either GEF or GMF for me.

GEF is the standard graphical editor library, but as it is so generic, often higher level libraries are used instead of it, such as GMF or Graphiti (both subprojects of the Graphical Modeling Project). Neither of these three tools are especially easy to use - if you have no previous knowledge of such technologies, maybe Graphiti is the easiest to start with, but I am not really sure about that.

On the other hand, Draw2D is a vector-graphic library used in GEF, while Zest is a graph layout (and visualization) library created on top of Draw2D. In themselves, neither of them are capable of creating a full-fledged graphical editor, however, Zest is useful for creating a read-only view of some graph model with automatic layout.

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