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 – using Images in JFace


The TimeZoneLabelProvider can return an Image, which is a standard SWT widget. Although the Image can be loaded (as in the previous chapter), in JFace there are resource registries, which can be used to manage a set of resources for the application. These include the ImageRegistry , FontRegistry , and ColorRegistry classes. The purpose of a resource registry is to maintain a list of Resource instances and ensure that they are correctly disposed, but only when they are no longer needed.

JFace has a set of these global registries; but there are specific ones, such as the ones used by the IDE to maintain a folder and file type icons, for example. These use descriptors to hold a meaning for the resource, and a means to acquire an instance of the resource based on that descriptor. The returned resource is owned by the registry, and as such, should not be disposed by clients that acquire them.

  1. In the TimeZoneLabelProvider, add a method getImage() that...