Eclipse's Common Navigator Framework

Starting with version 3.2 Eclipse provides a generic API (shortnamed "CNF") for creating navigational viewers.

The following is a summary about CNF from Michael Elder's blog entry What does the Common Navigator Framework (CNF) help me do?:

So in a nutshell, the CNF is designed to help you integrate document models into an navigator experience, integrate content that isn't specific to the workbench, allow you to absorb other content seamlessly (in particular resource and Java(tm) models), and mitigate your expense in time and effort to absorb incremental enhancements from release to release from layers beneath you. The CNF began as a product solution for a general problem in Rational Application Developer v6.0, and has been contributed to the open source Eclipse Platform in 3.2 to allow the community to better integrate their navigational viewers and provide a more cohesive user experience across software layers and products.

For detailed information about CNF please refer to Michael Elder's blog.

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See also : ProjectExplorer, SpringExplorer