The Draw2d Examples - A Hidden Treasure

While this is not really documented, hidden in the depths of the GEF cvs repository, there is quite a bunch of nice little Draw2d examples, which may help beginners as well as prospective experts in understanding the framework's principles and mechanisms.

All that has to be done in order to access them is to check out the org.eclipse.draw2d.examples plug-in from the examples module of the repository (please follow GEF's getting involved pages for detailed instructions on how to access the repository). All examples are implemented as standalone Java applications, so they can quite easily be executed.

Of course, every set of examples has to include a "Hello World". So here we are:

But there's more. Consider for instance the flow, grid, and toolbar layout demos.

And what about playing around a bit with shape styles...

... or learning more about the behavior of locators?

There's also something to demonstrate Draw2d's more advanced features like shortest path connection routing ...

... directed graph layout ...

... zooming ...

... printing ...

... or text flows.

And there's even more. So please have a look!

And if you wonder why these examples are not bundled with the GEF SDK, or why they are not included in the Draw2d reference documentation: well, that's something we wondered about ourselves and that we are planning to change in the near future (see bugs #213041 and #332575).