Using JViews products in Eclipse RCP applications

In order to install the Rogue Wave® JViews Eclipse plug-ins, you need to install from the local site as shown below.

Many services in JViews need to look up a resource. Since the classical way to provide access to resources is a class loader, JViews uses class loaders for this purpose. But in Eclipse/RCP applications, each plug-in corresponds to a class loader, and the JViews class loader sees only its own resources, not the application resources. To fix this problem, you can register plug-in class loaders with JViews through the IlvClassLoaderUtil.registerClassLoader function. Each resource lookup then considers the registered class loaders and, if the plug-ins are configured accordingly, also considers the dependencies of the registered class loaders.

The code for doing this is usually located in a plug-in activator class. For example:

public class MyPluginActivator extends AbstractUIPlugin 
{
    /**
     * This method is called upon plugin activation
     */
    public void start(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
      super.start(context);
      IlvClassLoaderUtil.registerClassLoader(getClass().getClassLoader());
    }

    /**
     * This method is called when the plugin is stopped
     */
    public void stop(BundleContext context) throws Exception {
      super.stop(context);
      IlvClassLoaderUtil.unregisterClassLoader(getClass().getClassLoader());
    }

  }

The overriding of stop() is necessary so that, when the plug-in gets unloaded, JViews gets notified about the plug-in that is going to stop and can drop references to its resources or instances of its classes. The activator plug-in is usually also the place where IlvProductUtil.registerApplication is called.

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) is the windowing toolkit of the Eclipse development environment and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

Composite parent = ...;
IlvJManagerViewPanel mapView = new IlvJManagerViewPanel();
Control SWTmapView = new IlvSwingControl(parent, SWT.NONE, chart);

Composite parent = ...;
Control SWTmapView =
    new SwingControl(parent, SWT.NONE) {
      protected JComponent createSwingComponent() {
        return new IlvJManagerViewPanel();
      }
      public Composite getLayoutAncestor() {
        return parent;
      }
    };

You can handle the SWT-Swing user interface events in one or two threads.