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 feature


A feature project is used in Eclipse to create, test, and export features. Features are used to group many plug-ins together into a coherent unit. For example, the JDT feature consists of 26 separate plug-ins. Features are also used in the construction of update sites, which are covered later in this chapter.

  1. Create a feature project by going to File | New | Project... and then selecting Feature Project.

  2. Name the project com.packtpub.e4.feature and this will be used as the default name for the Feature ID. As with plug-ins, they are named in reverse domain name format, though typically they end with feature to distinguish them from the plug-in that they represent. The version number defaults to 1.0.0.qualifier. The feature name is used as the text name which is shown to the user when it's installed, and will default to the last segment of the the project name.

  3. Click on Next and it will prompt for plug-ins to be chosen. Choose com.packtpub.e4.clock.ui from...