Mastering Eclipse Plug-In Development

Highly exstensible, the Eclipse Interactive Development Environment is chosen for its high performance and for its plug-in ecosystem.

This book covers the most advanced concepts of plug-in development for Eclipse, teaching readers to develop, deploy and customise plug-ins for complex requirements and expanding knowledge to an expert level.

Assuming a knowledge of the basics, this book dives right into the details. Start by learning to define new JFace wizards and extend Eclipse with custom extension points, then move quickly on to details of how to define new commands for the Eclipse console and include native code into a plug-in. Engage with modular application design patterns and thread context classloaders, before finishing with details on how to create and manage P2 sites and write help documentation for an Eclipse plug-in.

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 even migrated some plugins from Visual Age for Java to WebSphere Studio/Eclipse as part of his PhD on Automated Verification of Design Patterns. He got involved in the open source community as a tester when Eclipse 2.1 was being released for Mac OS X, 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 generic Java and specifically, Eclipse and OSGi subjects. He keynoted the 2011 OSGi Community Event on the past, present, and future of OSGi. The coverage of both new releases of the Eclipse platform and its projects, as well as video interviews with some of the Eclipse project leads can be found via the InfoQ home page, for which he was nominated and won the Eclipse Top Contributor 2012 award.

Alex currently works for an investment bank in London. He also has a number of apps on the Apple AppStore through Bandlem Limited. When he's not working on technology, and if the weather is nice, he likes to go flying from the nearby Cranfield airport.