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

Working with the Eclipse 4 model


Since Eclipse was first released in November 2001, its user interface has remained mostly static. Each window has a perspective, which contains zero or one editor area, and zero or more view parts. In early releases, every perspective had exactly one editor area, and it was not until the release of Eclipse RCP with Eclipse 3.0 in 2004 that it was possible to disable the editor, and have a custom application suitable for a non-IDE use.

However, the presentation of the perspective always proved difficult to customize, such as changing the background color or arrangement of the windows or toolbars.

The Eclipse 4 model provides a way to model an application both at design time, and also interpret and modify it at runtime. An application has a top-level model, but may also have additional model fragments contributed by different bundles. Additionally, the separate rendering framework allows the UI to be represented with different tools such as JavaFX and HTML. In...