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

Why JFace?


While SWT provides generic implementations for basic widgets (such as trees, buttons, labels, and so on), these often work at a level that deals with strings and responding to selection by integer index. To make it easier to display structured content, JFace provides several viewers, which provide combinations of SWT widgets and event managers to provide a UI for structured content.

There are many types of viewers (all subclasses of Viewer), but the most common ones are ContentViewers such as the TreeViewer and TableViewer . There are also text-based viewers (TextViewer has subclasses for SourceViewer ) as well as operational views (ConsoleViewer for the Console view, DetailedProgressViewer for the Progress view). In this chapter, we'll create views based on TreeViewer and TableViewer. Since JFace is based on SWT, knowing how SWT works is essential to understand how JFace is used.