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 – installing Maven


In this section, we will install and use Maven to build a simple Java project to ensure that the tool is configured appropriately. The first time it runs, it will cache many JAR files from the Central repository into a folder ${user.home}/.m2/repository; for subsequent runs it will be much faster.

  1. Go to http://maven.apache.org/ and download the Maven 3.0.5.zip package (for Windows) or Maven 3.0.5.tgz (for Mac OS X/Linux).

  2. Unzip/untar the package and install Maven at a convenient directory, referred to in these instructions as MAVEN_HOME.

  3. Either add MAVEN_HOME/bin to the PATH environment variable or specify the full path to the Maven executable JAR. Run mvn --version and if all works well, a version message should be printed out.

  4. To create a new Maven project, run mvn archetype:generate

    -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes

    -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart

    -DarchetypeVersion=1.1

  5. When prompted for the groupId, enter com.packtpub.e4...