Book Image

Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Alex Blewitt
Book Image

Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Alex Blewitt

Overview of this book

Eclipse is used by everyone from indie devs to NASA engineers. Its popularity is underpinned by its impressive plug-in ecosystem, which allows it to be extended to meet the needs of whoever is using it. This book shows you how to take full advantage of the Eclipse IDE by building your own useful plug-ins from start to finish. Taking you through the complete process of plug-in development, from packaging to automated testing and deployment, this book is a direct route to quicker, cleaner Java development. It may be for beginners, but we're confident that you'll develop new skills quickly. Pretty soon you'll feel like an expert, in complete control of your IDE. Don't let Eclipse define you - extend it with the plug-ins you need today for smarter, happier, and more effective development.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we covered how to get started with Eclipse plug-in development. From downloading the right Eclipse package to getting started with a wizard-generated plug-in, you should now have the tools to follow through with the remainder of the chapters of this book.

Specifically, we learned these things:

  • The Eclipse SDK and the Eclipse IDE for Eclipse Committers have the necessary plug-in development environment to get you started

  • The plug-in creation wizard can be used to create a plug-in project, optionally using one of the example templates

  • Testing an Eclipse plug-in launches a second copy of Eclipse with the plug-in installed and available for use

  • Launching Eclipse in debug mode allows you to update code and stop execution at breakpoints defined via the editor

Now that we've learned how to get started with Eclipse plug-ins, we're ready to look at creating plug-ins that contribute to the IDE, starting with SWT and Views—which is the topic of the next chapter.