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 – reporting progress


Normally when a Job is running, it is necessary to periodically update the user to let them know the state of progress. By default, if a Job provides no information, a generic busy indicator is shown. When a Job is executed, it is passed an IProgressMonitor object, which can be used to notify the user of progress (and provide a way to cancel the operation). A progress monitor has a number of tasks, each of which has a total unit of work that it can do. For jobs that don't have a known amount of work, UNKNOWN can be specified and it will be displayed in a generic busy indicator.

  1. Open the HelloHandler and go to the execute() method. In the run() method of the inner Job, add a beginTask() at the beginning, and a worked() method in the loop after each second's sleep, for five iterations. The code will look like the following:

    protected IStatus run(IProgressMonitor monitor) {
      try {
        monitor.beginTask("Preparing", 5000);
        for(int i=0;i<5;i++) {
      ...