Eclipse Plug-in Development: Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Description

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 the use of plug-ins and features.

This books takes you on the full journey of plug-in development, starting with an introduction to Eclipse plug-ins, continuing through packaging, and culminating in automated testing and deployment. The example code provides simple snippets that can be developed and extended to get you going quickly.

What you will learn

• Create plug-ins for Eclipse 4.x
• Test plug-ins automatically with JUnit
• Display tree and table information in views
• Upgrade Eclipse 3.x plug-ins to Eclipse 4.x
• Understand how and when to build user interfaces from SWT and JFace
• Run tasks in the background and update the user interface asynchronously
• Automate builds of plug-ins and features and update sites with Maven Tycho
• Automate user interface tests with SWTBot

About the Author

Dr. Alex Blewitt has been developing Java applications since version 1.0 was released in 1996, and has been using the Eclipse platform since its first release as part of the IBM WebSphere Studio product suite. He got involved in the open source community as a tester when Eclipse 2.1 was being released for macOS, and then subsequently as an editor for EclipseZone, including being a finalist for Eclipse Ambassador in 2007. More recently, Alex has been writing for InfoQ, covering Java and specifically Eclipse and OSGi subjects.

He is co-founder of the Docklands.LJC, a regional branch of the London Java Community in the Docklands, and a regular speaker at conferences.

Alex currently works for an investment bank in London, and has a number of apps on the App Store through Bandlem Limited. Alex is the author of both Mastering Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development and Swift Essentials, both by Packt Publishing.