# Graphical Editing Framework Programmer's Guide

The Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) provides a foundation for building rich, interactive user interfaces which are not easily built using native widgets found in the base Eclipse platform.

This guide provides an architectural overview of the Graphical Editing Framework. The reader should have working knowledge of the Eclipse platform.

The GEF component is separated into three plug-ins:

- Draw2d (`org.eclipse.draw2d`) - the lightweight toolkit for painting and layout on an SWT Canvas

- GEF (`org.eclipse.gef`) - an interactive MVC framework built on top of Draw2d

- Zest (`org.eclipse.zest`) - a visualization toolkit built on top of Draw2d

Notice that "GEF" can refer to the entire component (2 plug-ins), or just to the plug-in org.eclipse.gef.