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

Summary


Eclipse 4 is a new way of building Eclipse applications, and provides a number of features that make creating parts (views/editors), as well as obtaining service references and communication between parts much easier. If you are building Eclipse-based RCP applications, then there is no reason not to jump on the Eclipse 4 framework to take advantage of its features.

If you are building plug-ins that will run on both Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4, then you have to consider backward compatibility requirements before you can make the switch. One way of supporting both is to use the workbench compatibility plug-in (which is what Eclipse 4.x uses if you download the SDK or one of the EPP packages) and continue to use the Eclipse 3.x APIs. However, this means the code cannot take advantage of the Eclipse 4.x mechanisms. Another approach is to write Eclipse 4 based plug-ins, and then wrap them in a reverse compatibility layer. Such a layer is provided in the "Eclipse E4 Tools Bridge for 3.x"...