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Create a commercial-quality Eclipse IDE, Part 1: The core

Create professional, commercial-quality IDEs that plug into Eclipse

Prashant Deva, Founder, Placid Systems

Prashant Deva is the founder of Placid Systems and the author of the ANTLR Studio plug-in for Eclipse. He also provides consulting related to ANTLR and Eclipse plug-in development. He has written several articles related to ANTLR and Eclipse plug-ins, and he frequently contributes ideas and bug reports to Eclipse development teams. He is currently busy creating the next great developer tool.

Summary: This "Create a commercial-quality Eclipse IDE" series examines how to create professional, commercial-quality IDEs that plug into Eclipse. In this tutorial, learn how to create the core of the IDE.

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Date: 05 Sep 2006
Level: Advanced
PDF: A4 and Letter (70 KB | 20 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 56750 views
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Before you start

About this tutorial

This "Create a commercial-quality Eclipse IDE" tutorial series shows you what it takes to churn out integrated development environments (IDEs) as Eclipse plug-ins for any of the existing programming languages or your own language. It walks you through the two most important parts of the IDE -- the core and the user interface (UI) -- and takes a detailed look at the problems associated with designing and implementing them.

The series uses ANTLR Studio IDE as a case study and examines its internals to understand what it takes to create a highly professional, commercial-level IDE. Code samples help you follow the concepts and understand how to utilize them in your own IDE.

Part 1 looks at creating the base of the IDE, called the core, on top of which all the other components of the IDE are built. It also discusses the general architecture of an IDE and examines techniques employed in the commercial ANTLR Studio IDE to solve some of the problems you may encounter while designing a core.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes a basic knowledge of parsers and lexers (what they are and they do), ANTLR, and working with the Eclipse Java™ Development Tools (JDT).

System requirements

To try the code examples in this tutorial, you need the Eclipse software development kit (SDK) running Java Virtual Machine (JVM) V1.4 or later. In addition, to generate the parser and lexer examples, you need ANTLR (see Resources).

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