This book provides a general introduction to developing plug-ins for the Eclipse platform. No prior experience, other than Java, is necessary to be able to follow the examples presented in this book. By the end of the book, you should be able to create an Eclipse plug-in from scratch, as well as be able to create an automated build of those plug-ins.
Chapter 1, Creating Your First Plug-in, provides an overview of how to download Eclipse, set it up for plug-in development, create a sample plug-in, launch and debug it.
Chapter 2, Creating Views with SWT, provides an overview of how to build views with SWT, along with other custom SWT components such as system trays and resource management.
Chapter 3, Creating JFace Viewers, will show how to create views with JFace using TreeViewers and TableViewers, along with integration with the properties view and user interaction.
Chapter 4, Interacting with the User, interacts with the user, as well as the Jobs and Progress APIs, using commands, handlers, and menus.
Chapter 5, Storing Preferences and Settings, shows how to store preference information persistently, as well as displaying information via the Preferences pages.
Chapter 6, Working with Resources, tells how to load and create Resources in the workbench, as well as how to create a builder and nature for automated processing.
Chapter 7, Creating Eclipse 4 Applications, discusses the key differences between the Eclipse 3.x and Eclipse 4.x models, along with commands, handlers and menu items.
Chapter 8, Migrating to Eclipse 4.x, teaches how to efficiently migrate views created for Eclipse 3.x to the new Eclipse 4.x model.
Chapter 9, Styling Eclipse 4 Applications, discusses how to style the UI with CSS, and create widgets that can adjust to CSS styles.
Chapter 10, Creating Features, Update Sites, Applications, and Products, takes the plug-ins created so far in this book, aggregates them into features, publishes to update sites, and teaches you how applications and products are used to create standalone entities.
Chapter 11, Automated Testing of Plug-ins, teaches how to write automated tests that exercise Eclipse plug-ins, including both UI and non-UI components.
Chapter 12, Automated Builds with Tycho, shows how to build Eclipse plug-ins, features, update sites, applications, and products automatically with Maven Tycho.
Chapter 13, Contributing to Eclipse, discusses how to use Git to check out Eclipse code bases, how to report bugs with Bugzilla, and how to upload patches into Gerrit.
Appendix A, Using OSGi Services to Dynamically Wire Applications, looks at OSGi services as an alternative means of providing dependent services in an Eclipse or OSGi application.
Appendix B, Pop Quiz Answers, covers all the answers enlisted in the pop quiz sections in the book.