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 parent project


It's common for the parent and child projects to be located outside the workspace. For historic reasons, Eclipse doesn't deal well with nested projects in the workspace. It's also common for the parent project to host all the Tycho configuration information, which makes setting up the child projects a lot easier.

  1. Create a General project by navigating to File | New | Project | General | Project.

  2. Unselect use default location.

  3. Put in a location that is outside the Eclipse workspace.

  4. Name the project com.packtpub.e4.parent.

  5. Click on Finish.

  6. Create a new file pom.xml in the root of the project.

  7. Copy the content of the plug-in's pom.xml file to the parent, but change the artifactId to com.packtpub.e4.parent and the packaging to pom.

  8. Create a properties element in the pom.xml file. Inside, create two child tags: tycho-version (which has the content 0.18.0) and eclipse (with the value http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno).

  9. Modify the reference to 0.18.0...