Eclipse Plug-ins

by Clayberg, Eric; Rubel, Dan

• ISBN13: 9780321553461
• ISBN10: 0321553462
• Edition: 3rd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-12-11
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

The definitive book for anyone developing Eclipse plug-ins.

Author Biography

Eric Clayberg is Senior VP for Product Development for Instantiations, Inc., an Advanced IBM Business Partner that serves on the Eclipse Foundation and contributes extensively to the Eclipse initiative. He has more than seventeen years of commercial software development experience, including twelve years with Java and nine with Eclipse. He is primary architect and product manager for many award-winning Java and Smalltalk products, including WindowBuilder Pro, CodePro, and VA Assist. He has a B.S. from MIT, an MBA from Harvard, and has cofounded two successful software companies—ObjectShare and Instantiations.

Dan Rubel, CTO for Instantiations, Inc., is an entrepreneur and an expert in the design and application of object-oriented technologies with more than fifteen years of commercial software development experience, including thirteen years of experience with Java and nine years with Eclipse. He is the primary architect and product manager for several successful products, including RCP Developer, WindowTester, jFactor, and jKit.  He has a B.S. from Bucknell and is a cofounder of Instantiations.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Skip McGaughey	p. xxxiii
Foreword by Simon Archer	p. xxxv
Preface	p. xxxvii
Using Eclipse Tools	p. 1
Getting Started	p. 1
The Eclipse Workbench	p. 3
Setting Up Your Environment	p. 14
Creating a Project	p. 19
Navigating	p. 26
Searching	p. 28
Writing Code	p. 35
Team Development Using CVS	p. 49
Running Applications	p. 55
Introduction to Debugging	p. 59
Introduction to Testing	p. 63
Introduction to Mylyn	p. 65
Summary	p. 69
A Simple Plug-in Example	p. 71
The Favorites Plug-in	p. 71
Creating a Plug-in Project	p. 72
Reviewing the Generated Code	p. 77
Building a Product	p. 86
Installing and Running the Product	p. 92
Debugging the Product	p. 94
PDE Views	p. 96
Writing Plug-in Tests	p. 99
Book Samples	p. 105
Summary	p. 106
Eclipse Infrastructure	p. 107
Structural Overview	p. 107
Plug-in Directory or JAR file	p. 110
Plug-in Manifest	p. 113
Activator or Plug-in Class	p. 120
Plug-in Model	p. 126
Logging	p. 128
Eclipse Plug-ins	p. 132
Summary	p. 133
The Standard Widget Toolkit	p. 135
SWT History and Goals	p. 135
SWT Widgets	p. 138
Layout Management	p. 178
Resource Management	p. 188
GUI Builders	p. 190
Summary	p. 191
JFace Viewers	p. 193
List-Oriented Viewers	p. 193
Text Viewers	p. 211
Summary	p. 214
Commands and Actions	p. 215
Commands	p. 216
Menu and Toolbar Contributions	p. 220
Handlers	p. 236
Key Bindings	p. 238
IAction versus IActionDelegate	p. 240
Workbench Window Actions	p. 242
Object Actions	p. 257
View Actions	p. 270
Editor Actions	p. 277
Actions and Key Bindings	p. 284
RFRS Considerations	p. 286
Summary	p. 287
Views	p. 289
View Declaration	p. 291
View
View Commands	p. 313
Linking the View	p. 336
Saving View State	p. 340
Testing	p. 345
Image Caching	p. 346
Auto-sizing Table Columns	p. 348
RFRS Considerations	p. 348
Summary	p. 352
Editors	p. 353
Editor Declaration
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Preface PrefaceWhen we were first exposed to Eclipse back in late 1999, we were struck by the magnitude of the problem IBM was trying to solve. IBM wanted to unify all its development environments on a single code base. At the time, the company was using a mix of technology composed of a hodgepodge of C/C++, Java, and Smalltalk.PrefaceMany of IBM's most important tools, including the award-winning Visual-Age for Java IDE, were actually written in Smalltalka wonderful language for building sophisticated tools, but one that was rapidly losing market share to languages like Java. While IBM had one of the world's largest collections of Smalltalk developers, there wasn't a great deal of industry support for it outside of IBM, and there were very few independent software vendors (ISVs) qualified to create Smalltalk-based add-ons.Meanwhile, Java was winning the hearts and minds of developers world-wide with its promise of easy portability across a wide range of platforms, while providing the rich application programming interface (API) needed to build the latest generation of Web-based business applications. More important, Java was an object-oriented (OO) language, which meant that IBM could leverage the large body of highly skilled object-oriented developers it had built up over the years of creating Smalltalk-based tools. In fact, IBM took its premiere Object Technology International (OTI) group, which had been responsible for creating IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk and VisualAge Java environments (VisualAge Smalltalk was the first of the VisualAge brand family and VisualAge Java was built using it), and tasked the group with creating a highly extensible integrated development environment (IDE) construction set based in Java. Eclipse was the happy result.OTI was able to apply its highly evolved OO skills to produce an IDE unmatched in power, flexibility, and extensibility. The group was able to replicate most of the features that had made Smalltalk-based IDEs so popular the decade before, while simultaneously pushing the state of the art in IDE development ahead by an order of magnitude.The Java world had never seen anything as powerful or as compelling as Eclipse, and it now stands, with Microsoft's .NET, as one of the world's premier development environments. That alone makes Eclipse a perfect platform for developers wishing to get their tools out to as wide an audience as possible. The fact that Eclipse is completely free and open source is icing on the cake. An open, extensible IDE base that is available for free to anyone with a computer is a powerful motivator to the prospective tool developer.It certainly was to us. At Instantiations and earlier at ObjectShare, we had spent the better part of a decade as entrepreneurs focused on building add-on tools for various IDEs. We had started with building add-ons for Digitalk's Smalltalk/V, migrated to developing tools for IBM's VisualAge Smalltalk, and eventually ended up creating tools for IBM's VisualAge Java (including our award-winning VA Assist product and our jFactor product, one of the world's first Java refactoring tools). Every one of these environments provided a means to extend the IDE, but they were generally not well-documented and certainly not standardized in any way. Small market shares (relative to tools such as VisualBasic)