I have been working with Eclipse RCP for over a week now, and I've now been given an Eclipse plugin written in 3.x, which I need to migrate to 4.x. I'm using a book called Eclipse 4 RCP by Lars Vogel which has a small section on this, but I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm to do.
I'm trying to do this throught the use of the compatiblity layer. It mentions to add a couple of features for this (org.eclipse.rcp, org.eclipse.emf.ecore, org.eclipse.emf.common) and your ready to go, but I don't exactly know what I'm to do here. Like do I add these to the existing product file of the 3.x plugin I've been given, or do I create a separate e4 project and point to that. Many of the tutorials I read are a bit vague with the details and its a shame there's no proper step by step guide for beginners with this. Any help would be great.
Probably, you should be creating a separate e4 plug-in project for this. And where you have to configure your extensions/extension points in e4 ways.
Basically, like creating a new project.
If you want to migrate your Eclipse 3.x RCP application to the Eclipse 4 programming model, you can't directly reuse existing plugin.xml based user interface components, e.g. Views or Editors based on the definition in plugin.xml .
Components based on the plugin.xml file must be adjusted to avoid inheritance of Eclipse classes and to use the programming model based on #Inject . They also must be contributed to the application model.
Components which are not directly based on the plugin.xml file must be adjusted if they use Eclipse 3.x singletons, as for example Platform or PlatformUI , to access Eclipse API
you may want to take a look at this page: https://www.eclipse.org/community/eclipse_newsletter/2013/february/article3.php
Related
I am interested in writing an eclipse plugin.
After reading various tutorials around the internet and working through some simple plugin examples, I am quite confused as to how you are supposed to use the new dependency injection/services style of programming I have read about in various places as one of the primary features of eclipse 4.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/FAQ#For_Adopters_.28Plug-In_Developers.29
The tutorials I've seen, and the eclipse wizard-generated plugins themselves, all use the "old" style of programming using extension points and referencing things using the singleton pattern. Apparently, this style is supported using a compatibility layer.
The information on 3.x style plugin development seems perfectly reasonable and workable to me, but it sounds bad that it is only supported using a "compatibility layer." Is this a style of programming that is going to be phased out/deprecated for Eclipse development?
Where can I find a guide on writing a plugin that uses the new, preferred style? And why do the eclipse plugin wizards themselves not even use this style, if it has been the preferred development model since eclipse 4 was originally released?! Everything I have found about writing eclipse 4 style programs focuses on standalone rcp "applications", not actual plugins to eclipse IDE.
Here are some tutorials I found which use what I understand to be the old style of plugin:
http://www.eclipsepluginsite.com/
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-ecplug/
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipsePlugIn/article.html
Can someone explain to me clearly what the current status of the eclipse 4 programming model for plugin development is? And if you could point me to some documentation of it that would be great as well.
Thanks!
It will be very long time before the compatibility layer goes as a huge amount of code depends on it.
You can only really use e4 if you are developing a new RCP and don't need any of the existing 3.x style plugins. e4 development is perfectly practical for new apps that don't use compatibility layer plugins - I have several such apps.
An e4 app can use extension points from core plugins which are not part of the compatibility layer. e4 applications make more use of direct injection and the application model which replace some of the old extension points.
For a plugin to an existing RCP (such as Eclipse itself) the 3.x style is required, although
Eclipse Luna provides some support for using e4 style views in a 3.x application.
As I have done the following tutorials:
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseRCP/article.html
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseJFaceTable/article.html
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/EclipseJFaceTableAdvanced/article.html
I wanted to combine the JFace table viewer (plugin from 2nd and 3rd tutorial) and the ToDo application from the first tutorial. In the JFace table example(s) there is a View extended from a ViewPart. In this the call:
getSite().setSelectionProvider(view)
inside the createPartControl method is fine and works.
But when I do the same in the other tutorial it does not work, I get a NullPointerException. The first article creates a plugin and then transform it using features and products into an Eclipse 4 application. So the classes in the application are not derived from a 'Part'. They are referenced using the application model and only use the annotation #PostConstruct.
Why is it that I get this NullPointerException?
And really, how can I get the SelectionProvider service linked to the Workbench?
I also tried to use PlatformUI.getWorkbench() but it says that the workbench does not yet exist.
Any help highly appreciated.
Thanks.
Eclipse 4 (e4) applications are completely different from traditional Eclipse 3.x style applications.
In an e4 application you cannot use a lot of things that are used in a Eclipse 3.x application - so you need to check which style the example you are using is based on. The e4 application has access to a lot of new features that are not available in a 3.x application.
In an e4 application you inject the ESelectionService to get and set the current selection.
I am working on RCP application for editing dsl files.
For now I managed to create two editors using Xtext 2.5 that works fine in Eclipse (validation, cross references, etc.). Also there is e4 based RCP application skeleton with custom navigation tree (files are loaded from remote server not from local workspace).
Now I have to integrate those both of them. Unfortunately I didn't find any up to date tutorials about this topic that works for my case.
Here are links that I tried:
This blog post describes integration for Eclipse 3.x
This one about e4 but version of Xtext is less than 2.5
Here is a lot of information about RCP but I didn't found anything about plugins integration with RCP.
There is similar question but it is not clear for me how to use obtained editor or how to get resourceProvider instance.
Does anyone have a reference to the relevant tutorial or sample?
According to Eclipse bug 401309 and various comments in the Eclipse forums XText editors are not compatible with a pure e4 RCP because they rely on lots of code from the 3.x compatibility layer.
You can still create an Eclipse 3.x style RCP, as described in your second reference.
I have added a comment to Bug 401309 where I describe how to make it work.
Is it possible to create Eclipse plug-ins (e.g view parts) using Eclipse e4 incubator?
Or is e4 only useful for 'window-based' applications?
I already checked How can I create a view using the E4 programming model to be a plug-in for Eclipse 4.2 or above?, but this did not give me an useful answer.
Add:
I want to create an Eclipse plug-in and not a standalone rcp application.
I'm not sure what exactly you want to achieve.
Option 1:
You want to write a plug-in for an e4 RCP application:
You can do this (e.g., contribute ViewParts to an e4 application model) via a model fragment.
Basically, instead of extending the org.eclipse.ui.views extension point in Eclipse 3.x you create an application model fragment file in your plug-in and reference this in an extension to the extension point org.eclipse.e4.workbench.model.
In the model fragment, you define the parts, commands, etc. you want to contribute.
See for example these tutorials for more details:
http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2012/06/26/eclipse-4-e4-tutorial-part-3-extending-the-application-model/
http://www.vogella.com/articles/Eclipse4Modularity/article.html
Option 2:
You want to write a plug-in e4 style for Eclipse itself.
As far as I know this is not possible straightforward, because currently, the Eclipse IDE cannot be enhanced with fragments (at least that is what https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=376486 indicates ...)
But when that works, see Option 1.
Until then, you'd have to use the classic extension points. You can still write your view using the POJO/Injection approach of e4, but you need to use the 3.x to e4 bridge. You can get some hints from
http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2012/06/18/migrating-from-eclipse-3-x-to-eclipse-4-e4/ .
In particular, see the paragraph starting "The third option is to use the 3.x e4 bridge from the e4 tools project"
I already have a standalone Eclipse RCP application. The next task is to integrate the plugins which are widely used in the Eclipse community like CDT or say PyDev to provide the editing and debugging facilities in respective programming languages inside the already developed RCP app. Just wondering how do i go about accomplishing this task. Should i start with playing around the extension points of the plugins and adding it to the MANIFEST.MF ?
What are the various ways of achieving this ? Which one to pick over the other?
The most important thing you should consider (besides the technical) is a conceptional.
Plugins like CDT are making a lot of assumptations about their environment they are integrated into. That means your RCP should have a very similar user-interface and behavior like the normal Eclipse SDK so that the integration of other "IDE-ish" plugins is not a break of the interface principles of your RCP.
If your RCP is not based on a common navigator, projects, files (in general the Workspace) and several editors the integration of Plugins like CDT will be a nightmare for your users and will feel like another application within your RCP.
Make also sure that ui-contributions from third-party-plugins are visible (e.g. if the third-party-plugin is contributing a preference page, make sure that your RCP has the menu-item to open the preference-window)
First you have to load the new features/plugins in your existing RCP application. For this you have to adapt your product definition and load the new feature.xml files. or you enhance your own feature.xml and place the new plugins into.
Afterwards you have to decide, whether the new functions/view/perspectives are contributions to an already existing RCP extension point and whether you use this extension point in your RCP product.
If you want to use the new functions in another way (because the default is not enough) you have to point to specific views/actions in the new plugins and call them by your self. Fot his you have to adapt the MANIFEST.MF of your own plugin and point to the new plugins. If you do it, you can not switch off the added features, because you do have a jard link to these plugins.
Your RCP product already depends on the RCP feature (org.eclipse.rcp) or a subset of its plug-ins. This means, it already includes the plug-ins defining the basic extension points.
To include functionality (extensions) from additional features, just add these features to your product configuration dependencies. For example, you would have to add the feature org.eclipse.cdt for CDT and org.python.pydev.feature for PyDev.
The hard part begins when you need to include only some of the features' plug-ins.
You'll have to isolate the plug-in(s) providing the functionality you require.
For UI contributions, you can use the plug-in selection spy by selecting the required UI part and clicking alt+shift+F1.
For non-UI contributions, information for contributed extensions can be found in the plugin.xml files in the plug-in sources.
These plug-ins, along with their dependencies can be added to a custom feature, which can be included in your product.
Although dated, the article Building a CDT-based editor might also be of help.