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 – groups and tab folders


A new TimezoneView will show a list of clocks in time zones around the world. This time, instead of using the plug-in wizard, the extension will be added manually.

Note

E4: The way views are defined for E4 is covered in Chapter 7, Understanding the Eclipse 4 Model. This chapter discusses how to do it in Eclipse 3.x and the Eclipse 3.x compatibility model of Eclipse 4.x.

  1. Right-click on the project and navigate to Plug-in Tools | Open Manifest, or find the plugin.xml file in the navigator and double-click on it.

  2. Go to the manifest editor's Extensions tab. The extensions will list org.eclipse.ui.views. Expand this, and underneath the Timekeeping (category) the Clock View (view) will be displayed, added via the plug-in wizard.

  3. Right-click on org.eclipse.ui.views and navigate to New | view from the menu. A placeholder entry name (view) will be added to the list, and the right-hand side lists properties such as the id, name, class, and category. Fill in the...