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 preference page


Although preferences can be stored, providing a user interface is necessary for end users. A preference page implements the IPreferencePage interface. The easiest way is to use FieldEditorPreferencePage as a super class, which provides most of the standard plug-in behavior needed. Perform the following steps:

  1. Open the plugin.xml of the clock.ui plug-in. In order to declare a new preference page, use the org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages extension point. Add the following code:

    <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages"><page name="Clock"class="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.ClockPreferencePage"id="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.preference.page"/>
    </extension>
  2. The same effect can be achieved by editing the plugin.xml in the editor and clicking on Add in the Extensions tab and selecting the preferencePages extension point.

  3. Create a class ClockPreferencePage that extends FieldEditorPreferencePage in the com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui package as...