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 – branding features


Features generally don't show up in the About dialog of Eclipse, as there is only space for a handful of features to appear there. Only top-level features which have branding information associated with them are shown in the dialog.

  1. Go to Help | About (on OS X, this is under Eclipse | About Eclipse) and there will be a number of icons present, consisting of the top-level branded features that have been installed. These features have an associated branding plug-in which contains a file called about.ini that supplies the information:

  2. First, set up an association between the feature and its branding plug-in, by re-using the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui plug-in from before. Open the feature.xml file, go to the Overview tab and add the name of the branding plug-in as com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui:

  3. Now, create a file in the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui plug-in called about.ini with the following content:

    featureImage=icons/sample.gif
    aboutText=\
    Clock UI plug-in\n\
    \n\
    Example...