Eclipse Plugin Development TUTORIAL

Eclipse Plugin Development Tutorial website to teach you how to develop eclipse plugins using simple examples to a complex eclipse rcp over time. This chapter will give you a detailed insight into Eclipse Architecture and we will develop a simple but fully functional eclipse plug-in so as to give you a quick start with eclipse plug-in development.

Overview

Eclipse isn’t a huge single java program, but rather a small program which provides the functionality of typical loader called plug-in loader. Eclipse (plug-in loader) is surrounded by hundreds and thousands of plug-ins. Plug-in is nothing but another java program which extends the functionality of Eclipse in some way. Each eclipse plug-in can either consume services provided by other plug-in or can extend its functionality to be consumed by other plug-ins. These plug-in are dynamically loaded by eclipse at run time on demand basis.

An Open Platform

Eclipse is an open platform. It is designed to be easily and infinitely extensible by third parties. At the core is the eclipse SDK, we can build various products/tools around this SDK. These products or tools can further be extended by other products/tools and so on. For example, we can extend simple text editor to create xml editor. Eclipse architecture is truly amazing when it comes to extensibility. This extensibility is achieved by creating these products/tools in form of plug-ins.

Figure 1-1

Inside the Eclipse SDK

Figure 1-2

RCP: On the bottom is RCP which provides the architecture and framework to build any rich client application.

IDE: It is a tools platform and a rich client application itself. We can build various form of tooling by using IDE for example Database tooling.

JDT: It is a complete java IDE and a platform in itself.

PDE: It provides all tools necessary to develop plug-ins and RCP applications. This is what we will concentrate on the course of this tutorial.

Plug-ins everywhere

All the layers in eclipse SDK are made up of plug-ins. If you see all the way, you will notice that everything is a plug-in in eclipse sdk.

Figure 1-3

Plug-in Architecture

A plugin is a small unit of Eclipse Platform that can be developed separately. It must be noted that all of the functionality of eclipse is located in different plugins (except for the kernel)

A plug-in can be delivered as a jar file. A plug-in is self-contained bundle in a sense that it contains the code and resources that it needs to run for ex: code, image files, resource bundles etc. A plug-in is self describing - when I say it is self describing it means that it describes who it is and what it contributes to the world. It also declares what it requires from the world.