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 – injecting subtypes


Although creating a POJO can be an efficient way of creating simple classes, it can be limiting to have a concrete class definition scattered through the class definitions. It is a better design to use either an abstract class or an interface as the service type.

  1. Create a new interface in the com.packtpub.e4.application package, called IStringService. Define the process() method as abstract:

    public interface IStringService {
      public abstract String process(String string);
    }
  2. Modify the reference in the Rainbow class to refer to the IStringService interface instead of the StringService class:

    @Inject
    private IStringService stringService;
  3. Run the application, switch to the Rainbow tab, and a dependency injection fault will be shown in the host Eclipse instance's Console view:

    org.eclipse.e4.core.di.InjectionException:
      Unable to process "Rainbow.stringService":
       no actual value was found for the argument "IStringService".
  4. Although the runtime knows that the...