EMF Components - Filling the Gap between Models and UI

The Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) provides code generation facilities for building tools and applications based on structured data models. Most of the Eclipse projects which somehow have to deal with modeling data are based on EMF since it simplifies the development of complex software applications with its modeling mechanisms. However, we argue that from the user interface point of view, the development of applications based on EMF could be made simpler, with more code reuse, and without having to deal with too many internal details. For this reason, in this paper, we propose Emf Components, a lightweight framework that allows easy and quick development of applications based on EMF and it can be configured to use all kinds of EMF persistence implementations (e.g., XMI, Teneo, CDO). It aims at providing a set of reusable components like trees, tables and detail forms that manage the model with the introspective EMF capabilities. The framework provides basic UI implementations which are customizable in a declarative way and with dependency injection mechanisms.