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 – 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 is unselected 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, 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 that the Show only extension points from the required plug-ins is unchecked. Choose the org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extension point and click on Finish:

  5. The editor will switch to a tree-based...