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 a grid


The preference values weren't lined up as expected. This is because the default preference field editor uses a FLAT style of rendering, which simply lays out the fields similar to a vertical RowLayout. Perform the following steps:

  1. Change it to a more natural look by specifying a GRID style of rendering:

    public ClockPreferencePage() {
      super(GRID);
    }
  2. Now when the preference page is displayed, it will look more natural as seen in the following screenshot:

What just happened?

The default or FLAT style does not render well. It was added in 2007 (see Eclipse bug 163281) before the popularity of the grid layout increased, and typically needs to be overridden to provide a decent user interface experience. Switching to GRID does this by working out the label length, field lengths, and setting up the split accordingly. Furthermore, the view is resizable with the fields taking up the additional stretch space.

If the layout needs further customization, or the widget set...