The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) provides tools to create,
develop, test, debug, build and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments,
features, update sites and RCP products.
PDE also provides comprehensive OSGi tooling, which makes it an ideal
environment for component programming, not just Eclipse plug-in
development.
PDE is broken into three main components:
UI - A rich set of models, tools and editors to develop plug-ins and OSGi bundles
API Tools - Tooling to assist API documentation and maintenance
Build - Ant based tools and scripts to automate build processes
Discover the latest features in the What's New section.
PDE UI
PDE UI provides a editors, wizards, launchers, views and other tools to create a full featured environment to develop and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments,
features, update sites, RCP products and OSGi bundles.
Some of the PDE tools include:
Form-Based Manifest Editors: Multi-page editors that centrally manage all manifest files of a plug-in or feature.
RCP Tools: Wizards and a form-based editor that allow you to define, brand, test and export products to multiple platforms.
New Project Creation Wizards: Create a new plug-in, fragment, feature, feature patch and update sites.
Import Wizards: Import plug-ins and features from the file system.
Export Wizards: Wizards that build, package and export plug-ins, fragments and products with a single click.
Launchers: Test and debug Eclipse applications and OSGi bundles.
Views: PDE provides views that help plug-in developers inspect different aspects of their development environment.
Miscellaneous Tools: Wizards to externalize and clean up manifest files.
Conversion Tools: Wizard to convert a plain Java project or plain JARs into a plug-in project.
Integration with JDT: Plug-in manifest files participate in Java search and refactoring.
To get started, try out the following cheat sheets:
PDE Build facilitates the automation of plug-in build processes. PDE Build produces Ant scripts based on development-time information provided by, for example, the plugin.xml and build.properties files. The generated Ant scripts, can fetch the relevant projects from a CVS repository, build jars, Javadoc, source zips, put everything together in a format ready to ship and send it out to a remote location (e.g., a local network or a downloads server).