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Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide Cover

Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide

Extend and customize Eclipse

Paid access
|Sep 2025
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Develop skills to build powerful plug-ins with Eclipse IDE through examples

Key Features

  • Create useful plug-ins to make Eclipse work for you
  • Learn how to migrate Eclipse 3.x plug-ins to Eclipse 4.x
  • From automation to testing, find out how to get your IDE performing at an impressive standard

Book Description

Eclipse is used by everyone from indie devs to NASA engineers. Its popularity is underpinned by its impressive plug-in ecosystem, which allows it to be extended to meet the needs of whoever is using it. This book shows you how to take full advantage of the Eclipse IDE by building your own useful plug-ins from start to finish.
Taking you through the complete process of plug-in development, from packaging to automated testing and deployment, this book is a direct route to quicker, cleaner Java development. It may be for beginners, but we're confident that you'll develop new skills quickly. Pretty soon you'll feel like an expert, in complete control of your IDE.
Don't let Eclipse define you - extend it with the plug-ins you need today for smarter, happier, and more effective development.

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
  • Find out how 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
  • Automate user interface tests with SWTBot [/list]

Who this book is for

This book is for Java developers familiar with Eclipse who need more from the IDE. This book will sharpen your confidence and make you a more productive developer with a tool that supports rather than limits you.

Table of Contents

  1. Creating Your First Plug-in
  2. Creating Views with SWT
  3. Creating JFace Viewers
  4. Interacting with the User
  5. Storing Preferences and Settings
  6. Working with Resources
  7. Understanding the Eclipse 4 Model and RCP applications
  8. Migrating views to Eclipse 4 IDE
  9. Styling and custom hooks in E4
  10. Creating Features Update Sites Applications and Products
  11. Automated Testing of Plug-ins
  12. Automated Builds with Tycho
  13. Contributing to Eclipse
  14. Appendix A: Using OSGi Services to dynamically wire applications
  15. Appendix B: Pop Quiz Answers
PDF ISBN: 978-1-78528-501-1
Publisher: Packt Publishing Limited
Copyright owner: © 2016 Packt Publishing Limited
Publication date: 2025
Language: English
Pages: 458