Slides from my talk at Eclipse Con North America 2014 (https://www.eclipsecon.org/na2014/session/emfedit-story-adapters)
So you need to build a Java application for desktop, mobile or web? You already know that EMF could be helpful in many ways because it handles the burden of writing the data classes (entities) and provides RESTful serialization of those data? Yeah, that is perfectly correct. But how does it help you with changing, or editing, your data? What is the point behind the so-called EMF.Edit framework?
During this talk, you will learn how to build the foundations for a rich client application in any widget toolkit (SWT, JavaFX...). Among other things you will learn how to customize the generated EMF editor without messing up with the generated classes. You will learn how the content and label providers are working under the hood to help create your own beautiful, robust and maintainable applications. By the end of this talk you will finally untangle the gordian knot between Adapters, ItemProvider, AdapterFactory, ItemProviderAdapterFactory, AdapterFactoryLabelProvider, AdapterFactoryContentProvider, etc.
This talk is dedicated to EMF rookies who know EMF as a generator of JavaBeans on Steroids and want to know more about the steroids themselves (the Adapter framework, the ItemProvider framework and the amazing helper classes around those two). This talk will be full of sample code and demo. All of this material is available on Github https://github.com/mbarbero/econ-na-2014-emf-edit.
