IBM releases User Interface Help System Built on Eclipse

Posted by: gham Hamilton on March 22, 2006 @ 01:37 AM
The IBM User Interface Help System Built on Eclipse is designed to help developers create online help systems that can be easily browsed and searched and that can run on many different operating systems or across a network. A developer can use this technology to create a help system that can be launched from a Help menu or Help button in the application. The created help system can be used to create a "Documentation CD" of browsable and searchable content. The help system can also be run on a server so that the content can be accessed by client machines and be viewable and searchable in the client browsers.

This application was created from a subset of plug-ins from the Eclipse Platform. The plug-ins are packaged together in order to provide for a Web-based online help system that can be run off a CD, on a local machine or in a client-server network. The help system code is a collection of Java Server Pages and servlets, along with an embedded Web application server, a search engine and the Eclipse run-time environment. After the documentation modules are included in the appropriate directory and the user starts the application, the user interface of the Web application is loaded in the browser. At that point, the user can navigate through the table of contents, view topics, and search the documentation.

This technology runs on Windows; a Linux version is coming soon.