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 part


Having created a sample application, the next step is to create a view, known as a part in E4. Parts are the generic name for views, editors, and other grouping components in an E4 application. Unlike views in Eclipse 3, the view class doesn't have to have any references to the Eclipse APIs. This makes it particularly easy to build and test in isolation.

  1. Open the plugin.xml file of the com.packtpub.e4.application project, and go to the Dependencies tab. Add a dependency to the org.eclipse.ui.di bundle, if it's not already added.

  2. Create a new class called Hello in the com.packtpub.e4.application.parts package.

  3. Add a field called label of type Label.

  4. Add a create() method, annotated with @PostConstruct that instantiates the Label and sets its text to Hello.

    Note

    If @PostConstruct appears not to work, ensure javax.annotation is added as a package import to the bundle (see http://www.vogella.com/articles/EclipseRCP/article.html#tutorial_api2).

  5. Add a focus() method...