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 logging


The OSGi platform defines a LogService which allows messages to be logged to a central collector. In the E4 platform, an instance of LogService is available as part of the platform, routing error messages through to the console.

  1. Open the Hello class and add a private field LogService log.

  2. Add an @Inject annotation above the LogService field.

  3. In the create() method, add a call to the log service.

  4. The Hello class will look like:

    import javax.inject.Inject;
    import org.osgi.service.log.LogService;
    public class Hello {
      @Inject
      private LogService log;
      @PostConstruct
      public void create(Composite parent) {
        label = new Label(parent, SWT.NONE);
        label.setText("Hello");
        log.log(LogService.LOG_ERROR,"Hello");
      }
    }
  5. Run the application, and a log message will be printed out to the console of the host Eclipse:

    !ENTRY org.eclipse.e4.ui.workbench 4 0 2013-01-24 23:15:51.543
    !MESSAGE Hello

What just happened?

The E4 runtime infrastructure injected the reference...