When coding in Eclipse RCP or, for that matter, any JFace based UI, you often times are implementing viewers, which require a content provider and a label provider. In most cases, you’re dealing with the IStructuredContentProvider API, which would be appropriate for both the ListViewer and TableViewer classes.

If you have a need to populate these views with data that is effectively static, you can use the org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ArrayContentProvider class to get you up and running quickly; and it is really quite functional in many cases.

Bind Me Later

One of the key elements of any non-trivial data binding implementation is how you control the timing of the binding of data. Most of the simple examples of JFace or JGoodies data binding simply have ‘live’ bindings, where any change made on one side is immediately propagated to the other side. While this is valuable, and is certainly a neat party trick when you have two UI controls bound to the same field, it is in my estimation, the less common scenario.

I’ve been working with JFace a lot recently in an RCP application. One of the technologies I have started working with in detail is JFace Data Binding; now that it has left ‘provisional’ status, I figure I ought to start taking advantage of it wherever I can.

JGoodies Comparisons