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 – adding keywords


Eclipse had a search field in the preferences list since version 3.1. This is defined not from UI but from a separate keyword extension instead. The keyword has an ID and a label, but the label isn't shown; rather, it's a space separated list of words which can be used in the filtering dialog. Perform the following steps:

  1. To add the keywords offset and timezone to the ClockPreferencePage, create a new extension point in plugin.xml for org.eclipse.ui.keywords:

    <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.keywords">
      <keyword id="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.keywords"label="offset timezone"/>
    </extension>
  2. Now associate these keywords with the preference page itself as follows:

    <extension point="org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages">
      <page name="Clock" ... >
        <keywordReference id="com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui.keywords"/>
      </page>
    </extension>
  3. Run the Eclipse instance, go to the Preferences page and type timezone and offset in the search...