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

Time for action – building an update site


The update site created in Chapter 8, Creating Features, Update Sites, Applications, and Products, is used to provide a standard hosting mechanism for Eclipse plug-ins and features. This can be built automatically with Tycho as well.

  1. Move the com.packtpub.e4.update project underneath the com.packtpub.e4.parent project.

  2. Add the line <module>com.packtpub.e4.update</module> to the parent pom.xml file.

  3. Copy the pom.xml file from the clock plugin to the update project.

  4. Modify the packaging to <packaging>eclipse-repository</packaging>.

  5. Change the artifactId to com.packtpub.e4.update.

  6. The resulting pom.xml file will look like this:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <project xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/
      POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-
      4.0.0.xsd" xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion&gt...