Eclipse extensibility

TheIBM® DevOps Model Architect UML products themselves are built on the extensibility architecture provided by Eclipse, and this architecture is also available to you.

Plug-ins and the extension points that they provide are foundational to Eclipse extensibility. In fact, Eclipse is made up of a set of plug-ins. A plug-in is coded in Java™ and resides in a plug-ins directory. Each plug-in includes a manifest file that declares the extension points it provides to other plug-ins and the extension points it is making use of from other plug-ins. The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), which is part of the Eclipse Software Development Kit (SDK), provides a set of tools to assist in all stages of plug-in development.

  • To learn more about plug-in development and the PDE, see the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide" topic and the "PDE Guide" topic in online help.
  • On the Web, see the Eclipse.org Web page, at www.eclipse.org.

The Java development tooling (JDT) provided by Eclipse includes a Java IDE that can be used to add Java-specific behavior to the Eclipse platform and create plug-ins that interact with Java programs or resources.

  • To learn more about the JDT, see the "JDT Plug-in Developer Guide" topic in online help.

An Eclipse component that is more closely related to modeling is the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Tools and applications built on this framework can generate efficient, customizable Java code from models. Within EMF, models are defined using XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). This standard file format eases model exchange between tools and the manipulation of related data. EMF is extended by the Eclipse Modeling Framework Technologies (EMFT) component which contains several technologies that complement the manipulation of EMF based models. These EMFT technologies are OCL, Query, Transactions and Validation.

To learn more about the framework and its associated application programming interfaces (APIs), see following topics in the online help:

  • Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) Programmer's Guide
  • Service Data Objects (SDO) Developer Guide
  • EMFT OCL Developer Guide
  • EMFT Query Developer Guide
  • EMFT Transactions Developer Guide
  • EMFT Validation Developer Guide
  • On the Web, see the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) Web page or the Eclipse Modeling Framework Technologies (EMFT) Web page at http://www.eclipse.org.

The Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) provides a generative component and runtime infrastructure for developing graphical editors based on EMF and the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF). This component also supplies exemplary tools for select domain models which illustrate its capabilities.

  • To learn more about the GMF and GEF framework and their associated application programming interfaces (APIs), see the "Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) Developer Guide" topic and the "GEF and Draw2d Plug-in Developer Guide" topic in online Help.
  • On the Web, see the Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) Web page or the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) Web page at http://www.eclipse.org.

For model access at the appropriate level of abstraction, and in accordance with the Unified Modeling Language specification, use the UML APIs. These APIs provide an EMF-based implementation of the UML metamodel.

Note: Some information, such as links to Eclipse documentation or to developer guides, is available only from the help topics that are installed with the product.
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