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 reusable widget


Although the ClockView shows an animated clock, creating an independent widget will allow the clock to be reused in other places.

  1. Create a new class in the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui package, called ClockWidget, that extends Canvas.

  2. Create a constructor that takes a Composite parent and an int style bits parameter, and passes them to the superclass:

    public ClockWidget(Composite parent, int style) {
      super(parent, style);
    }
  3. Move the implementation of the paintControl() method from the ClockView to the ClockWidget. Remove the PaintListener references from the ClockView class.

  4. In the ClockWidget constructor, register an anonymous PaintListener that delegates the call to the paintControl() method:

    addPaintListener(new PaintListener() {
      public void paintControl(PaintEvent e) {
        ClockWidget.this.paintControl(e);
      }
    });
  5. Move the TickTock thread from ClockView to the ClockWidget constructor; this will allow the ClockWidget to operate independently. Change...