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 product


An Eclipse product is a branding and a reference to an application. The product also has control over what features or plug-ins will be available, and whether those plug-ins will be started or not (and if so, in what order).

Chapter 7, Understanding the Eclipse 4 Model created a product to bootstrap the E4 application (provided by the org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench.swt.E4Application class) but this section will create a product that binds to the headless application created previously to demonstrate how the linkage works.

  1. Use File | New | Other | Plug-in Development | Product Configuration to bring up the product wizard.

  2. Select the com.packtpub.e4.headless.application project and put headless as the filename.

  3. Leave Create a configuration file with the basic settings selected.

  4. Click on Finish and it will open up headless.product in an editor.

  5. Fill in the details as follows:

    • ID: com.packtpub.e4.headless.application.product

    • Version: 1.0.0

    • Name: Headless Product...