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

Getting started


Developing plug-ins requires an Eclipse development environment. This book has been developed and tested on Juno (Eclipse 4.2) Kepler (4.3). Use the most recent version available.

Eclipse plug-ins are generally written in Java. Although it's possible to use other JVM-based languages (such as Groovy or Scala), this book will use the Java language.

There are several different packages of Eclipse available from the downloads page, each of which contains a different combination of plug-ins. This book has been tested with:

These contain the necessary Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) feature as well as the source code, the help documentation, and other useful features. (The RCP and RAP package should not be used, as it will cause problems with exercises in the Chapter 7, Understanding the Eclipse 4 Model.)

It is also possible to install the Eclipse PDE feature into an existing Eclipse instance. To do this, go to the Help menu and select Install New Software, followed by choosing the General Purpose Tools category from the update site. The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment feature contains everything needed to create a new plug-in.