Book Image

Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example : Beginner's Guide

By : Dr Alex Blewitt
Book Image

Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example : Beginner's Guide

By: Dr Alex Blewitt

Overview of this book

<p>As a highly extensible platform, Eclipse is used by everyone from independent software developers to NASA. Key to this is Eclipse’s plug-in ecosystem, which allows applications to be developed in a modular architecture and extended through its use of plug-ins and features.<br /><br />"Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide" takes the reader through the full journey of plug-in development, starting with an introduction to Eclipse plug-ins, continued through packaging and culminating in automated testing and deployment. The example code provides simple snippets which can be developed and extended to get you going quickly.</p> <p>This book covers basics of plug-in development, creating user interfaces with both SWT and JFace, and interacting with the user and execution of long-running tasks in the background.</p> <p>Example-based tasks such as creating and working with preferences and advanced tasks such as well as working with Eclipse’s files and resources. A specific chapter on the differences between Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4.x presents a detailed view of the changes needed by applications and plug-ins upgrading to the new model. Finally, the book concludes on how to package plug-ins into update sites, and build and test them automatically.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we covered how to get started with Eclipse plug-in development. From downloading the right Eclipse package (from a bewildering array of choices) to getting started with a wizard-generated plug-in, you should now have the tools to follow through with the remainder of the chapters in this book.

Specifically, we covered:

  • The Eclipse SDK (also known as Eclipse Classic) has the necessary Plug-in Development Environment to get you started

  • The plug-in creation wizard can be used to create a plug-in project, optionally using one of the example templates

  • Testing an Eclipse plug-in launches a second copy of Eclipse with the plug-in installed and available for use

  • Launching Eclipse in debug mode allows you to update code and stop execution at breakpoints defined via the editor

Now that we've learned about how to get started with Eclipse plug-ins, we're ready to look at creating plug-ins which contribute to the IDE; starting with SWT and Views, which is the topic of the next chapter.