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Best practices for developing Eclipse plugins

Using markers, annotations, and decorators

Andy Flatt (aflatt@uk.ibm.com), Software Developer, IBM

Andy Flatt is a developer at the IBM UK Software Development Laboratory in Hursley. His background includes Java, Java Performance, OSGi, and integration test. Prior to software development, Andy studied at the University of Hertfordshire where he holds a first class BSc(Hons) degree in Computer Science. He may be reached at aflatt@uk.ibm.com.

Mickael Maison (mimaison@uk.ibm.com), Software Developer, IBM

Since joining IBM in mid-2009, Mickael has been working in the Runtime Deliveries department of the IBM Java Technology Center. After working on the L3 Support team for the IBM Java SDK, he moved to a developer role. In his spare time, Mickael enjoys music and traveling.

Summary: This tutorial highlights best practices when marking information to resources using markers, and then introduces annotations and decorators that you use to highlight markers within the workbench. By extending extension points, you can reuse and adapt the built-in functions in Eclipse and perform advanced resource marking, such as moving a text marker when editing text. We discuss methods that take advantage of the plugin model, which allows for an efficient, high performance, and integrated look and feel plugin.

Date: 16 Aug 2011
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (99 KB | 14 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 55291 views
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Introduction

When developing a plugin for an IDE Eclipse environment, you have several design considerations. These considerations ensure that you:

Do not lock up the user interface thread.
Decorate the UI without impacting performance.
Process data in the background.

This tutorial discusses how to process and display data associated with resources stored in the workspace with these design considerations. We will examine how Eclipse provides a marker interface to store and handle information about a resource.

We provide best practices for handling data markers against a resource. First, we show how to mark data, then build knowledge to represent the marker on the user interface, and then update the marker as the resource changes. In this context, resources are Eclipse objects that implement the IResource interface, such as projects, files, folders, and Java™ objects (including packages, classes, and source).

This tutorial is intended for developers who can write a basic plugin but want to learn best practices when dealing with Eclipse resources.

Eclipse.org documents individual extension points and interfaces. This article provides assistance in choosing the best practice of using them in combination. Read more to learn how to take advantage of existing Eclipse functions to provide new features.

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