Monday, February 22, 2010

GEF turns 10

While reviewing and committing some small features and bug fixes this month ([1], [2], [3], [4]) , we noticed that the copyright header on some of the GEF source required an update to:

* Copyright (c) 2000, 2010 IBM Corporation and others.

Happy birthday, GEF is turning 10 years old.

It occurred to me that the year 2000 was somewhat wacky given that the GEF project started in 2002 at Eclipse.org. Have we really been working with GEF that long?

I went back to one of our old Rational Software intranet servers, pre IBM acquision. Sure enough I found an original drop of GEF provided by IBM dated 2000.

This drop of GEF has the familiar GEF Logic Editor Example. Anyone old enough to remember the other original GEF example?

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  • [1] Bugzilla 245182 - Draw2d Geometry API should support elementary calculations related to Euclidean Geometry
  • [2] Bugzilla 241767 -ToolTipHelper should be able to be subclassed for enhanced tooltips
  • [4] Bugzilla 301995 - Support option to set only positive coordinates for children figures in FreeformLayout

4 comments:

Ian Bull said...

There's the flow example, but I don't think that's older than the Logic one. I also remember the simple shape example (that's how I learned GEF in 2003) -- wow, I've really been using eclipse for 7 years -- but the shape example was never a real GEF example.

What other ones were there?

Has GEF always been built on Draw2D?

Jens v.P. said...

Happy Birthday GEF!
I would like to add: GEF changed my live! (Actually that's true ;-) ).

@Ian: Randy Hudson wrote me (6 years ago ;-) ) that they used HotDraw instead of Draw2D (that is, firstly there was only HotDraw, then GEF+HotDraw, then GEF+Draw2D).

BTW:What's the news regarding the GEF incubator proposal? I've tried to start a discussion in the GEF newsgroup, so far w/o success...

Chris Aniszczyk (zx) said...

Nice!

I remember learning GEF via the Shapes example. Those were the days, lack of documentation and pain! :)

Konstantin Scheglov said...

+1 to Chris.
Logic example was very complex.
So, it was very nice to find simple Shapes example. Hm... Or there was even simpler set of examples? It was also around 2003. ;-)