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 – using layouts


Now that ClockWidget has been created, multiple instances can be added into ClockView.

  1. Modify the ClockView class's createPartControl() method to create three ClockWidget instances:

    final ClockWidget clock1 = new ClockWidget(parent, SWT.NONE);
    final ClockWidget clock2 = new ClockWidget(parent, SWT.NONE);
    final ClockWidget clock3 = new ClockWidget(parent, SWT.NONE);
  2. Run the test Eclipse instance and show the Clock View. Three clocks will be shown, counting in seconds:

  3. In the ClockView constructor, create a new RowLayout with SWT.HORIZONTAL, and then set it as the layout on parent Composite:

    public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
      RowLayout layout = new RowLayout(SWT.HORIZONTAL);
      parent.setLayout(layout);
  4. Run the code again now and the clocks will be in a row (horizontal):

  5. Resize the view, the clocks will flow into different rows:

    Note

    RowLayout has a number of fields that can affect how the widgets are laid out:

    • center – if components are centered (vertically...