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

Creating actions, commands, and handlers


The first few releases of the Eclipse framework provided Action as a means of contributing to menu items. These were defined declaratively via actionSets in the plugin.xml file, and many tutorials still reference those today. At the programming level, when creating views, Actions are still used to provide context menus programmatically.

They were replaced with commands in Eclipse 3, as a more abstract way of decoupling the operation of a command with its representation of the menu. To connect these two together, a handler is used.

Note

E4: Eclipse 4.x uses the command's model, and decouples it further using the @Execute annotation on the handler class. Commands and views are hooked up with entries on the application's model. The basic ideas covered in this chapter will translate into examples in the E4 in Chapter 7.