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 E4 application


Eclipse applications use an application ID to launch and start execution. For E4 applications, org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench.swt.E4Application is used. Since this is specified within a product, to start with a new E4 application will be created.

  1. Go to the File | New | Project... menu and choose Eclipse 4 | Eclipse 4 Application Project from the list.

    Note

    If the Eclipse 4 Application Project is not shown here, check that the E4 tools are installed correctly.

  2. Create a project with the name com.packtpub.e4.application, and step through the wizard. Choose the default values for each field.

  3. On the last page, ensure that the Create sample contents option is selected. This will ensure that the E4 tools creates standard parts and menus for the default application.

  4. Click on Finish and the project will be created.

  5. Right-click on the com.packtpub.e4.application project and choose Run As | Eclipse Application. This launches a new version of the IDE, which isn't...