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 – serving an update site


Now that the update site has been developed, tested, and automatically built, the final stage is to upload the contents of the update site (under com.packtpub.e4.update/target/repository) and make it available on a website or ftp server so that others can install it. If Python 2.7 or higher is installed, run a simple web server as follows:

  1. Change to the directory com.packtpub.e4.update/target/repository.

  2. Run Python's SimpleHTTPServer:

    python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
    Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8080 ...
  3. Verify the update site by adding http://localhost:8080/ as a remote update site in Eclipse.

If you don't have Python installed, then some operating systems have a means to serve web-based content already, or another web server can be used. OS X has Web Sharing where files in ~/Sites are served from; Linux systems typically have Apache configured to allow per-user web sharing in ~/public_html, and Microsoft Windows has IIS where the default location is c...