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

Time for action – categorizing the update site


The Group items by category mechanism allows a small subset of features to be shown in the list, grouped by category. Eclipse is a highly modular application, and a regular install is likely to include over 400 features and over 600 plug-ins. A one-dimensional list of all of the features will take up a significant amount of UI space and not provide the best user experience; and in any case, many of the features are subsets of the core functionality (Mylyn alone can install over 150 features, depending on what combinations are selected in the install).

This categorization works by providing a category.xml file (also known as site.xml), which defines a category and a collection of features within that category. When the Group items by category checkbox is selected, only the groups and features defined in the category.xml file are shown, and the rest of the features and plug-ins are hidden. These are usually done via a separate Update Site Project...