Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide

In Detail

As a highly extensible platform, Eclipse is used by everyone from independent software developers to NASA. Key to this is Eclipse's plug-in ecosystem, which allows applications to be developed in a modular architecture and extended through its use of plug-ins and features.

"Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide" takes the reader through the full journey of plug-in development, starting with an introduction to Eclipse plug-ins, continued through packaging and culminating in automated testing and deployment. The example code provides simple snippets which can be developed and extended to get you going quickly.

This book covers basics of plug-in development, creating user interfaces with both SWT and JFace, and interacting with the user and execution of long-running tasks in the background.

Example-based tasks such as creating and working with preferences and advanced tasks such as well as working with Eclipse's files and resources. A specific chapter on the differences between Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4.x presents a detailed view of the changes needed by applications and plug-ins upgrading to the new model. Finally, the book concludes on how to package plug-ins into update sites, and build and test them automatically.

Approach

A Beginner's Guide following the "by Example" approach. There will be 5-8 major examples that will be used in the book to develop advanced plugins with the Eclipse IDE.

Who this book is for

This book is for Java developers who are familiar with Eclipse as a Java IDE and are interested in learning how to develop plug-ins for Eclipse. No prior knowledge of Eclipse plug-in development or OSGi is necessary, although you are expected to know how to create, run, and debug Java programs in Eclipse.