The Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) allows developers to create a rich graphical editor based on an application model. GEF contains the Draw2D plugin. It provides a layout and rendering toolkit for displaying graphics. The framework offers many common operations that can be used and extended for a specific domain. It employs an MVC (model-view-controller) architecture which enables simple changes to be applied to the model from the view.
An application that uses GEF has to provide three classes for every graphical object. The application model class which contains the graphical information of an object, as well as its properties. In addition, you need a so-called editpart and a figure, which is based on the above mentioned Draw2D. The last two build the view of the architecture, whereas the application model is evidently the model.
Michael Pradel
2006-06-01