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 – installing E4 tooling


To work with Eclipse 4 modeled applications, it is necessary to install the E4 tools to allow the application XMI to be edited through an editor. These are not shipped with the standard Eclipse distribution package, and must be installed separately.

  1. Add the following update site by going to Window | Preferences | Install/Update | Available Software Sites, then click on Add... and put in:

    Note

    In OS X, the Preferences menu is located under the Eclipse menu.

    Note

    Alternatively, the tools can be found by installation through the Eclipse Marketplace.

  2. Click on OK in the Add Site dialog and on OK in the Preferences page to add it. Once added, go to Help | Install New Software and then select the newly added site in the list. Select the the following features:

    • CSS file editor

    • CSS spy for Eclipse 4

    • Eclipse 4 core tools

    These add the ability to edit both...