The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
In object-oriented programming, a class is a construct that is used as a blueprint to create instances of itself – referred to as class instances, class objects, instance objects or simply objects. A class defines constituent members which enable these class instances to have state and behavior...
for developing UI features that can be tedious to implement." It is a layer that sits on top of the raw widget system, and provides classes for handling common UI programming tasks. It brings model view controller
Model-view-controller
Model–view–controller is a software architecture, currently considered an architectural pattern used in software engineering. The pattern isolates "domain logic" from the user interface , permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each .Model View Controller...
The Standard Widget Toolkit is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE...
.
Provides Viewer classes that handle the tedious tasks of populating, sorting, filtering, and updating widgets
Provides Actions to allow users to define their own behavior and to assign that behavior to specific components, e.g. menu items, tool items, push buttons, etc.
In a graphical user interface of computers, a dialog box is a type of window used to enable reciprocal communication or "dialog" between a computer and its user. It may communicate information to the user, prompt the user for a response, or both...
A software wizard or setup assistant is a user interface type that presents a user with a sequence of dialog boxes that lead the user through a series of well-defined steps. Tasks that are complex, infrequently performed, or unfamiliar may be easier to perform using a wizard...
s, and defines a framework for building complex interactions with the user
Its primary goal is to free the developer up, letting the developer focus on the implementation of his or her specific application without having to be concerned with the underlying widget system or solving problems that are common in almost all UI applications.
A primary concern of the Eclipse group when developing JFace was that under no circumstances did they want to hide the SWT component implementation from the programmer. JFace is completely dependent on SWT
Standard Widget Toolkit
The Standard Widget Toolkit is a graphical widget toolkit for use with the Java platform. It was originally developed by IBM and is now maintained by the Eclipse Foundation in tandem with the Eclipse IDE...
, but SWT is not dependent on JFace. Furthermore, the Eclipse Workbench is built on both JFace and SWT; in some instances, it bypasses JFace and accesses SWT directly.
Example
The following is a basic Hello World program using JFace.
import org.eclipse.jface.window.ApplicationWindow;
import org.eclipse.swt.SWT;
import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.*;
public class HelloWorld extends ApplicationWindow {
public static void main(String[] args) {
new HelloWorld.run;
}
public HelloWorld {
super(null);
}
public void run {
setBlockOnOpen(true);
open;
Display.getCurrent.dispose;
}
protected Control createContents(Composite parent) {
Label label = new Label(parent, SWT.CENTER);
label.setText("Hello, World");
return label;
}
}
