Gnowsis in Eclipse
Sooner or later (probably September 2006) we will move the gnowsis gui to Eclipse RCP. The big advantage of that is that we have a nice gui and a community that knows how to make frameworks.
Setting up the application
The application can be set up similar to what dbin.org did or the Hayloft/Haystack people do.
What we would need is an "Nepomuk application" object with roughly these properties:
- getPimoService();
- getPimoStore();
- ... get all other services
For the applicationWindow:
- getCurrentResourceDS(); - the currently selected resource
- getCurrentModelDS() - the currently selected model. The model could be expanded with operations for committing changes or rollback
Then each editor and view can access them.
Selection and Data model in the background
The eclipse selection model could be combined with the known GnoGno components from GnognoComp.
Actions
Eclipse actions are a big opportunity for us. If we manage to transfer as much as possible from Action or IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate we can save much time.
Also, this would allow us to have plugins that have new actions for resources (what we always wanted).
Views and Editors
yes, views. oh boy, views. Heiko Maus always wanted to have views.
Trying out the RCP, a experience report
by Leo Sauermann and Benny Horak
We started at 17:30 by downloading Eclipse 3.1.2 and slavishly following the Hello World Tutorial here:
ok, all worked, the empty "hello World" deployment thingy with .exe file and so on weights 7MB. wuff but ok.
Then Leo decided to rename the packages from "semanticdesktop" to "com.example.semanticdesktop" and that was the last time we saw our hello world. shoots, restart.
After Benny got the control, he changed the plugins first window from title "Hello World" to "Semantic Desktop".
Hours later....
ok, we try now the "mail demo" and extend it with a RDF view showing hte pimo tree. First problem: we don't want to import openrdf directly but instead import it as OSGI bundle (woa, cool). Hm, the best approach seems the wizard "plugin from existing jar archives". that generates useful output.
Result at 19:30: we managed to include Sesame and gnowsis as Eclipse OSGI bundles and were able to load the PIMO ontology language from a local file and display it in a tree. Its a lot of work but it looks cool. So, Beer now.
