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 – creating a TreeViewer


As done in the previous chapter, a new TimeZoneTreeView will be created using the plugin.xml editor. This view will show the time zones, organized hierarchically by region.

  1. Right-click on the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui project and select Plug-in Tools | Open Manifest, if it's not open already.

  2. Open the Extensions tab and go to the org.eclipse.ui.views. Right-click on this and choose New | View, and fill in the following fields:

    • ID: com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.views.TimeZoneTreeView

    • Name: Time Zone Tree View

    • Class: com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.views.TimeZoneTreeView

    • Category: com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui

    • Icon: icons/sample.gif

  3. An entry is created in the plugin.xml file that looks like the following code snippet:

    <view
      category="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui"
      class="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.views.TimeZoneTreeView"
      icon="icons/sample.gif"
      id="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.views.TimeZoneTreeView"
      name="Time Zone Tree View"
      restorable="true">
    </view>
  4. As...