The Example Launcher is a tool for enumerating, running and browsing a variety of examples. While these operations may be performed manually (with some difficulty), the Example Launcher offers a convenient interface. For information on how to manipulate particular examples manually, please consult their related documentation.
To run the Example Launcher, pull down the Perspective menu, select the Show View menu item, then select Other from the submenu. A dialog will come up with a list of views. Expand SWT Examples and select the view named SWT Example Launcher. A view containing a list of examples to choose will appear.
The Example Launcher can launch two different types of examples: Workbench Views, and Standalone applications. Examples will generally be organized into categories to distinguish the one from the other.
Workbench Views are GUI panels that sit inside a given perspective. When the Launcher starts a program that is written to interact with the Workbench as a view, it is opened and embedded into the currently active perspective.
Standalone applications are programs that run independently of the current Eclipse Platform environment. First, a new Java VM and Eclipse Platform runtime is started, then the application's main() method is invoked. For this reason, these applications may take some time to load.
The example launcher view contains a tree list, a text area, and 2 buttons. The tree list contains a list of all the SWT examples you can choose to run. When an example is selected from the tree, the text area shows a short description of each example. The selected example can be executed by clicking on the Run button, which can be found just below the tree list. For some of the examples, you can also import the example source code into a project in the Workspace. A project, with a name specified by the user, is created and all the java classes required to run that example will be added to that newly created project.
Depending on the example and on the configuration of your system, it may be necessary to alter Project build paths or to define classpath variables to compile or run examples that have been imported to the Workspace.