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 – exporting a feature


Once a feature has been created and has one or more plug-ins added, they can be exported from the workbench. An exported feature can be installed into other Eclipse instances, as the next section will demonstrate. Note that exporting a feature also builds and exports all the associated plug-ins as well.

  1. To export a plug-in, go to File | Export | Deployable features. This will launch a dialog with the option to select any features in the workspace.

  2. Choose the com.packtpub.e4.feature and give a suitable directory location.

  3. Click on Finish and the feature and all of its plug-ins will be exported.

  4. Open the destination location in a file explorer and see the files created:

    • artifacts.jar

    • content.jar

    • features/com.packtpub.e4.feature_1.0.0.201305070958.jar

    • plugins/com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui_1.0.0.201305070958.jar

What just happened?

The File | Export | Deployable features did a number of steps under the covers. First, it compiled the referenced plug-ins into...