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 – styling the UI with CSS


The user interface for Eclipse 4 is styled with CSS. Although this is loosely based on the CSS syntax used in browsers, the content that can be used is interpreted by the Eclipse 4 runtime. CSS stylesheets are composed of selectors and style rules. A selector can be one of a widget name (for example, Button), a model class name (for example, .MPartStack) or an identifier (for example, #PerspectiveSwitcher).

  1. The default Eclipse 4 application generated by the wizard with sample content will have an empty CSS file called css/default.css. Open this file, and add the following rule:

    Shell {
      background-color: blue;
    }
  2. Run the application, and the background of the window (Shell) will be shown in blue.

  3. Basic CSS color names are supported, but hex values can also be used. Modify the default.css file as follows:

    Shell {
      background-color: #00FF00;
    }
  4. Run the application, and the background color will be shown in green.

  5. It's possible to support vertical gradients...