Breaking out of Eclipse: Developing an ActiveX host for SWT

Abstract

SWT enables Eclipse developers to create user interfaces with native OS look-and-feel and performance. Without significant extra effort, however, SWT applications are limited to operate within the confines of Eclipse, or as a standalone desktop application. This paper describes the motivation and initial efforts to embed SWT applications within an ActiveX container, presents a simple API to enable SWT applications for ActiveX containment, and discusses future directions for embedding the Eclipse framework into other external native OS applications.