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 – binding commands to keys


To hook up the command to a keystroke a binding is used. This allows a key (or series of keys) to be used to invoke the command, instead of only via the menu. Bindings are set up via an extension point org.eclipse.ui.bindings, and connect a sequence of keystrokes to a command ID.

  1. Open the plugin.xml in the clock.ui project.

  2. In the plugin.xml tab, add the following:

    <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.bindings">
      <key commandId="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.command.hello"
        sequence="M1+9"
        contextId="org.eclipse.ui.contexts.window"
        schemeId=
        "org.eclipse.ui.defaultAcceleratorConfiguration"/>
    </extension>
  3. Run the Eclipse instance, and press Cmd + 9 (for OS X) or Ctrl + 9 (for Windows/Linux). The same Hello dialog should be displayed, as if it was shown from the menu. The same keystroke should be displayed in the Help menu.

What just happened?

The M1 key is the primary meta key, which is Cmd on OS X and Ctrl on Windows/Linux....