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 headless application


A product hands the runtime off to an application, which can be thought of as a custom Eclipse Runnable class. This is the main entry point to the application which is responsible for setting up and tearing down the content of the application.

  1. Create a new plug-in, called com.packtpub.e4.headless.application. Ensure that the This plug-in will make contributions to the UI checkbox is deselected and Would you like to create a rich client application is set to No:

  2. Click on Finish and the project will be created.

  3. Open the project and select Plug-in Tools | Open Manifest and go to the Extensions tab. This is where Eclipse keeps its list of extensions to the system, and where an application is defined.

  4. Click on Add and then type applications into the box. Ensure the Show only extension points from the required plug-ins checkbox is deselected. Choose the org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extension point:

  5. When Finish is selected, a dialog may ask...