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 – depending on other features


If a feature needs functionality provided by another feature, it can be declared via the feature.xml file of the feature itself. For example, installing the E4 feature may depend on some runtime components provided by JGit, so installing the JGit feature will mean that everything required is present.

To add JGit as a dependency to the E4 feature.

  1. Edit the feature.xml file and go to the Dependencies tab:

  2. Click on Add Feature and select org.eclipse.jgit from the list. It will fill in a version range using the exact version specified in the plug-in; invariably it is better to substitute that with a lower-bound version number since that will allow the feature to be installed with a dependency that is slightly lower. This will result in a feature.xml that looks like:

    <feature id="com.packtpub.e4.feature" label="Feature"
      version="1.0.0.qualifier" provider-name="PACKTPUB">
      <requires>
        <import feature="org.eclipse.jgit" version="4...