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

Chapter 8, Creating Features, Update Sites, Applications, and Products


Pop quiz – understanding features, applications, and products

Q1

The keyword qualifier is replaced with a timestamp when plug-ins or features are built.

Q2

The files are artifacts.jar and content.jar as well as one file per feature/plug-in built.

Q3

The older site.xml can be used, or a category.xml file which is essentially equivalent.

Q4

If a feature requires another, then it must be present in the Eclipse instance in order to install. If a feature includes another, then a copy of that included feature is included in the update site when built.

Q5

An application is a standalone application which can be run in any Eclipse instance when it is installed. A product affects the Eclipse instance as a whole, replacing the launcher, icons, and default application launched.

Q6

An application is a class that implements IApplication and has a start() method. It is referenced in the plugin.xml file and can be invoked by id with -application on the command line.