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 – creating a direct menu and keybindings


Although using commands and handlers provides a generic way for reusing content, it is possible to provide a shorter route to implementing menus with a Direct MenuItem. The difference between this and a Handled MenuItem is that Direct just contains a reference to the @Executable class.

  1. To add a new direct menu item, open the Application.e4xmi file and navigate to the Application | Windows | Trimmed Window | Main Menu | Menu (File). Right-click on the menu and choose Add child | Direct MenuItem. In the dialog shown, fill in the details, including the class URI link to the HelloHandler, defined previously:

    • ID: com.packtpub.e4.application.directmenuitem.hello

    • Label: Direct Hello

    • Class URI: bundleclass://com.packtpub.e4.application/ com.packtpub.e4.application.handlers.HelloHandler

  2. Run the application, choose File | Direct Hello to show the same message as before.

  3. Keys can be bound to commands in an application, and can be enabled in one...