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

Chapter 1 – Creating Your First Plug-in


Eclipse workspaces and plug-ins

1. An Eclipse workspace is the location where all the projects are stored.

2. The naming convention for Eclipse plug-in projects is to use a reverse domain name prefix, such as com.packtpub. Additionally UI projects typically have a .ui. in their name.

3. The three key files in an Eclipse plug-in are META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, plugin.xml, and build.properties.

Launching Eclipse

1a. Quit the application with File | Exit.

1b. Use the stop button from the Debug or Console views.

2. Launch configurations are similar to pre-canned scripts which can start up an application, set its working directory and environment, and run a class.

3. Launch configurations are modified with the Run | Run Configurations… or Debug | Debug Configurations… menus.

Debugging

1. Use the Debug | Debug configurations or Debug | Debug As… menus.

2. Set step filters via the preferences menu to avoid certain package names.

3. Breakpoints can be: conditional, method entry/exit, enabled/disabled, or number of iterations.

4. Set a breakpoint and set it after a hit count of 256.

5. Use a conditional breakpoint and set argument==null as the condition.

6. Inspecting an object means opening it up in the viewer so that the values of the object can be interrogated and expanded.

7. The expression watches window allows arbitrary expressions to be set.

8. Multiple statements can be set in the breakpoint conditions provided that there is a return statement at the end.