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 – drawing a custom view


An SWT Canvas can be used to provide custom rendering for a view. As a starting point for drawing a clock, the Canvas will use drawArc() to create a circle.

  1. Remove the content of ClockView leaving behind an empty implementation of the setFocus() and createPartControl() methods.

  2. Run the target Eclipse instance and see that ClockView is now empty.

  3. In the createPartControl() method, do the following:

    1. Create a new Canvas, which is a drawable widget.

    2. Add PaintListener to the Canvas.

    3. Get gc from PaintEvent and call drawArc() to draw a circle.

    The code will look like:

    import org.eclipse.swt.*;
    import org.eclipse.swt.events.*;
    import org.eclipse.swt.widgets.*;
    import org.eclipse.ui.part.ViewPart;
    public class ClockView extends ViewPart {
      public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
        final Canvas clock = new Canvas(parent,SWT.NONE);
        clock.addPaintListener(new PaintListener() {
          public void paintControl(PaintEvent e) {
            e.gc.drawArc(e.x,e...