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 an editor


The example will be based on a (made-up) markup language called minimark, which is essentially a plain text file with blank delimited paragraphs that can be translated into an HTML file. This will involve creating an editor for text-based content, for minimark files. Perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new plug-in project called com.packtpub.e4.minimark.ui by going to File | New | Project | Plug-in project and filling in the following details:

    • Project name: com.packtpub.e4.minimark.ui

  2. Click on Next and fill in the following details:

    • ID: com.packtpub.e4.minimark.ui

    • Version: 1.0.0.qualifier

    • Name: Minimark

    • Vendor: PACKTPUB

    • Select the checkbox for Create an Activator

    • Select the checkbox for This plug-in will make contributions to the UI

    • Unselect the checkbox for Create a Rich Client Application

  3. Click on Finish and a new plug-in will be created.

  4. The next step is to create an editor for the minimark files. Open the plug-in's manifest by right-clicking on...