Eclipse 4 – the new Eclipse platform
The last major change to Eclipse was with the 3.0 release, when it migrated to OSGi. The Eclipse 4 model provides a significant departure from the Eclipse 3.x line, with the user interface being represented as a dynamic Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) model. In addition, both model and views can be represented as simple Plain Old Java Objects (POJOs) with services provided by dependency injection. There is also a separate rendering mechanism that allows an E4 application to be hosted by different UIs, although we'll look at the SWT renderer specifically. In this chapter, we'll take a look at the differences and how you can evolve Eclipse plug-ins forward.
In this chapter, we shall:
Set up an Eclipse 4 instance for development
Create an E4 application with parts
Send and receive events
Create commands, handlers, and menus
Inject custom POJOs
Since Eclipse was first released in November 2001, its user interface has...