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 – implementing incremental builds


The final part of the puzzle is to implement the incremental part of the builder. Most of the builds that Eclipse performs are incremental, which means that it only compiles the files that are needed at each point. An incremental build gives a resource delta which says what files have been modified, added, or removed. This is implemented in IResourceDelta which is handed to the IResourceDeltaVisitor visit() method. A resource delta combines an IResource with a flag that says whether it was added or removed. Perform the following steps:

  1. Open MinimarkBuilder and go to the visit(IResourceDelta) method. This is used by the incremental build when individual files are changed. Since the delta already has a resource, it can be used to determine if the file is relevant, and if so pass it to the processResource() method:

    public boolean visit(IResourceDelta delta) throws CoreException {
      IResource resource = delta.getResource();
      if(resource.getName...