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 – obtaining the selection


The current selection can be obtained through the selection service with a listener, similar to Eclipse 3.x. However, the ISelectionService in Eclipse 3.x has been replaced with an almost identical ESelectionService in Eclipse 4.x. (Other than the minor lack of JavaDoc and change of package name, the only significant difference between the two is that there is no add/removePostSelection methods.)

  1. Create a class called Rainbow in the com.packtpub.e4.application.parts package. Add a static final array of strings with colors of the rainbow.

  2. Add a create() method, along with a @PostConstruct annotation, that takes a Composite parent. Inside, create a ListViewer and set the input to the array of rainbow colors. The class will look like:

    public class Rainbow {
      private static final Object[] rainbow = { "Red", "Orange",
        "Yellow", "Green", "Blue", "Indigo", "Violet" };
      @PostConstruct
      public void create(Composite parent) {
        ListViewer lv = new ListViewer...