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 – running operations in the background


If the command takes a long time to execute, the user interface will be blocked. This happens because there is only one user interface thread, and because the command is launched from the UI, it will run in the UI thread. Instead, long-running operations should run in a background thread, and then once finished, be able to display the results. Clearly creating a new Thread (like the clock updates initially) or other techniques such as a Timer would work. However, the Eclipse system has a mechanism to provide a Job to do the work instead, or UIJob to run in the context of the UI thread.

  1. Open the HelloHandler and go to the execute method. Replace its contents with the following:

    public void execute() {
      Job job = new Job("About to say hello") {
        protected IStatus run(IProgressMonitor monitor) {
          try {
            Thread.sleep(5000);
          } catch (InterruptedException e) {
          }
          MessageDialog.openInformation(null, "Hello", ...