I had a long weekend doing a marketing plan (STP!) for school but I had some time to dabble with this new FilteredTree object (I got excited when I started to notice this object being adopted in places like debug). I decided to give a shot and think where filtered tree’s could be useful in the viewpoint of PDE. I saw quite a few applications (Wassim disagrees with me, like on some things) but it turns out we have an affinity for TableViewer’s in PDE and not too many tree’s. However, we do have one location where a filtered tree would be great (look for it in the next I build):
Filtered trees are awesome (thank you Platform UI), but there are a couple of issues that need to be solved. One of the big ones seems performance (try our new filtered extensions using JDT UI’s gargantuan plugin.xml). The other stems in extensibility (wouldn’t it be nice to have a FilteredViewer so you can use other types of viewers, not only trees?). If these two issues were tackled, we would have more adopters of the filtered tree (and other variants as they come into existance)