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Building Eclipse plug-ins using templates

Christopher Judd (cjudd@juddsolutions.com), Freelance Writer, Judd Solutions, LLC
Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions, LLC, international speaker, open source evangelist, Central Ohio Java Users Group coordinator, and co-author of Enterprise Java Development on a Budget and Pro Eclipse JST. He has spent eight years developing software in the insurance, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation industries. His current focus is consulting, mentoring, and training with Java, J2EE, J2ME, Web services and related technologies.

Summary:  You may know that Eclipse is a framework meant for building other tools. You may also know that you can build your own plug-ins for Eclipse. But did you know that Eclipse comes with seven plug-in templates to get you started? This tutorial gives you a start-to-finish look at building a plug-in using the Hello World template, then introduces you to the other templates.

Date:  28 Jun 2005
Level:  Intermediate
PDF:  A4 and Letter (1317 KB | 74 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity:  11494 views
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Should I take this tutorial?

In this tutorial, you will learn how to build, package, and deploy different types of Eclipse plug-ins using the seven plug-in templates provided with Eclipse. Using these templates helps you by generating many of the necessary plug-in files and configurations, and will reduce your learning curve by providing simple, customized working examples.

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What is this tutorial about?

This tutorial introduces you to Eclipse plug-in development. It walks you through the process of developing, packaging, and deploying a plug-in developed from the seven built-in plug-in templates. It discusses in detail each of the following plug-in templates to give you a broad understanding of the types of options available:

  • Hello World
  • Popup Menu
  • Property Page
  • View
  • Perspective Extension
  • Editor
  • Multi-page Editor

You can begin writing Eclipse plug-ins by hand from scratch. However, using the templates can help you:

  • Set up basic plug-in project structure
  • Reduce coding
  • Reduce your learning curve

Plug-in projects have a specific structure. Using the Plug-in Project wizard and templates helps to set up the required structure. In addition, it generates many of the necessary files and configurations. This project structure requires a plugin.xml file at the root of the project. Consider this file as a deployment descriptor for an Eclipse plug-in. It contains information about the plug-in's classpath, other plug-ins it depends on and which extension points the plug-in integrates into. In addition, the project must contain a class that extends org.eclipse.ui.plugin.AbstractUIPlugin. This class will be described in further detail later in this tutorial. And as with all Java™ technology projects, it must contain a source folder and output folder.

Using templates can significantly reduce the amount of typing. They generate many of the classes you need to get started and provide a simple implementation, usually a message dialog, to show you what an implementation might look like. The plug-in templates also update the plugin.xml file to include extension-points and required libraries.

The Eclipse platform itself has more than 1,900 classes and interfaces. Add the JDT, PDE, and J2SE and there is a lot to learn. The plug-in templates can reduce the learning curve and anxiety by providing simple, customized working examples in a few minutes.

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Prerequisites

To gain the most from this tutorial, you should have a good working knowledge of Eclipse. Before you start, make sure you have Eclipse downloaded and installed: Eclipse SDK V3.0.2.

Basic knowledge of Java is also helpful.

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