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

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

<p>This is a truly hands-on book for developing Eclipse plug-ins. A whole series of "Time for Action" sections gets you involved in practical examples that teach you everything from the very basics to more advanced activities. </p> <p><b>Overview</b></p> <ul> <li>Create plug-ins to extend the Eclipse runtime covering Eclipse 3.x and the changes required for Eclipse 4.x</li> <li>Plug-ins from design to distribution — wide coverage of the entire process</li> <li>No prior OSGi or Eclipse plug-in development experience necessary</li> </ul> <p><b>In Detail</b></p> <p>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.</p> <p>"Eclipse Plugin 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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><b>What you will learn from this book</b></p> <ul> <li>How to create plug-ins for Eclipse 3.x and 4.x and automatically test plug-ins with JUnit</li> <li>How to display tree and table information in views</li> <li>What are the specific differences between the Eclipse 3.x model and the Eclipse 4.x model</li> <li>How and when to build user interfaces from SWT and JFace</li> <li>How to run tasks in the background and update the user interface asynchronously</li> <li>How to build plug-ins, features and update sites with Maven Tycho and automate user interface tests with SWTBot</li> <li>How to store and obtain preferences, and how to integrate with the Preferences panel</li> <li>How to work with the Eclipse resources model for creating and updating files and reporting errors to the user</li> </ul> <p><b>Approach</b></p> <p>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.</p> <p><b>Who this book is written for</b></p> <p>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.</p>