Is there a beginner introduction to writing Eclipse plugins? - eclipse

I have tried and failed to create to find any good tutorials on writting plugins for Eclipse and the closest I have assumed a large degree of knowledge about the internals of Eclipse.
For what it is worth I have the programming skills to write the plugin. I need help with getting it plugged into Eclipse correctly.

The best tutorial I've found is Lars Vogels Plugin tutorial. Have a look at his other other Eclipse tutorials aswell. Alot of good content there.

Maybe this could be an interesting site for you:
http://www.eclipsepluginsite.com/
It covers setting up your plugin to advanced plugin tutorials.
I personally use it all the time.

Related

Eclipse 4 RCP (aka E4) documentation

Is there at least anything other than Vogella's tutorials and his book, which is completely based on those tuts? Examples from his repo are often either incomplete/unfinished/won't run and those examples even don't match the book actually..
I'd like to find at least some javadoc for this, because any step to a side and I'm completely lost on how to accomplish different tasks and what functionality is available.
Lars Vogel's Tutorials are the most complete and up-to-date documentation on Eclipse 4 development. Second to this is asking questions in Eclipse 4 Community Forum. Last option is to google for specific technical problems, which will in most cases lead you to blog posts from the same people that are active on the forums. (Mainly single supporters like Lars, some Eclipse devs and the guys from www.eclipsesource.com)
I discourage using the wiki, since much of the information may be outdated and may be more confusing than an actual help. Documentation for JFace and SWT can be reused from Eclipse 3.x since there are few to none changes in Eclipse E4.
E4 is alive and many of its components are now encapsulated in the standard Eclipse Platform. So most of Eclipse 3 docs and books are still relevant, as well as the Eclipse 4 ones.
If you want to understand the theory, you should start searching Eclipse conference slides explaining the Eclipse Platform and plug-ins. Trust me, it might sound old-style, but most of the times I find an EclipseCon Powerpoint or PDF, it is a great presentation, concentrating in 30 minutes the great work of some of the best Eclipse developers. If I had to re-start learning Eclipse, I would start again from some EclipseCon slides talking about Eclipse Plugins and Eclipse E4 Model.
For Eclipse4 or E4, we mean the Eclipse4 Model, which is now part of the Eclipse Platform. The Eclipse IDE itself supports both 3.x and Eclipse4 programming.
If you want to start Eclipse4, you should take a good book or a tutorial and follow it step by step. As an example you have these books:
Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) 2nd edition
Contributing to the Eclipse IDE Project (free ebook)
Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example: Beginner's Guide
Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to
However, there are a lot of sources of information, as many books, web tutorials and blogs. You can find most of them here:
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Articles,_Tutorials,_Demos,_Books,_and_More
https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/Tutorials
http://planeteclipse.org/planet/
In my personal list of who to follow, I could include: Vogella RCP, EclipseSource, Tom Schindl, OpCoach, RCPVision, Kai Toedter, AllBlue, Wim Yongman, and all the E4 Contributors who are writing articles. But it is unfair not to mention all of them.
If you're not satisfied by docs and tutorials, please file a bug to the Eclipse Platform; mention "missing documents to use E4" and specify what you need. The Platform UI team will take care of this, either by linking the existing documentation to the above wiki page or by creating the missing docs.
Note: Several of the developers of the Eclipse E4 and Platform team contributed to the success of the technology by fixing bugs, writing code, documents, tutorials, and opening businesses based on this.
Eclipse committers are writing most of the existing documents, and they usually go to conferences. So, usually, you get their very best at the Eclipse Conferences. If you get their slides, you can get the best of some Eclipse and Java Champions, condensed in 30 slides, or in a video of 30 minutes.
You can start contributing to open source, by following tutorials, like those written by Eclipse Committers, and then you can give back by writing documents to capture your achievements ;)
But, keep in mind that a tutorial is not a book. There is a different process behind. Thankfully those great developers found the time to write code and documentation at the same time.
i was in the same position for my sparetime RCP-Project and was about to give up
since Neon the situation has been improved a lot
my approach
take the tycho-Example from vogella for headless-build
add your custom parts with 'hello world' and play around to learn
for database-access use a declarative Service using jpa
an example will be
http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/
for logging and error-view
https://github.com/buchen/portfolio
this project eye-opening!
in general:
search Application.e4xmi in Github by date descending and you will find excelent examples and full working products
Forget about e3 and stick to plain e4. Take Advantage of the latest api's
make a i18n plugin and use
#Inject
#Translation
Messages messages;
use ISideEffect as Binding
for me it becomes fun to code with e4
After almost 2 years there has been no decent response to this question. So i'm considering the Eclipse E4 platform efectively dead, as there are still people voting for this question and can't find an answer.
The only answer I have is - move to the NetBeans Platform. There are similar problems there, but at least people do answer in the mailing list and there are books which are quite more recent and are actually providing working source code! Enve the NetBeans website provides free tutorial on a lot of stuff for free!
I mean it's really hard to believe, but you should try NetBeans platform - it's the only choice.
For anyone who stumbles here looking for an e4 example, here's a simple basic example on using eclipse 4 rcpeclipse 4: rcp getting started
Standard Eclipse documentation for version 4.3 (Kepler) contains javadoc for the most part of e4 project:
http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/overview-summary.html?cp=2_1_0

Eclipse RCP - good Eclipse Forms tutorial/resource

I'm looking for resources to learn how to use effectively Eclipse forms within an Eclipse RCP application. I was trying to use the newest SWT Window Builder plugin on Indigo but building forms this way doesn't really work for me eg. cannot put anything inside expandable composite etc. (I have Swing background with Netbeans designer) and I'm new to SWT.
All I can find so far is this quite old tutorial from 2005.
Any help, point to good tutorial/book/source code sample will be highly appreciated.
I've found http://www.vogella.de/ to be invaluable.
Not much changed actually since the old 2005 tutorial so it's still very usable.
Check these out in addition too:
Eclipse Forms: New in 3.3
DeveloperWorks article on making forms Web-like
Cheers,
Max
I've also got the hint to start with vogella but after the first 2 topics I realized It's to hard to start with.
What helped me much more was to create each example/sample project and look for the source. Once you understood how all works you can lookup at vogella what you exactly need.

Writing custom IDE on top of Eclipse

I wish to write my own Python IDE (just for the heck of it). I was wondering if I could use Eclipse as a foundation. This will save me from coding a whole lotta things (code editor, intellisense and so on).
To understand what I mean, please take a look at Visual Studio Isolated Shell. I'm essentially looking for something equivalent. Searching on Google hasn't helped. Is there anything like this available in Eclipse's case?
Yes. Eclipse is designed to have additional languages added and there is extensive support for this kind of plugin development. I'm surprised Googling didn't help - there's an entire site dedicated to a tutorial on the basics and a toolkit for developing such things

A plugin that makes eclipse usable documentation editor

I'm looking for a plugin that will make Eclipse a decent documentation editor with outlining, images etc... Does anyone know about anything? I've tried NQDoc, which is quite good but doesn't support vim plugin.
Any leads?
I have no direct experience with this tools, but the Eclipse MarketPlace is a good place to list all available solutions.
For instance: all Documentations tools.

Eclipse for BlackBerry, set up the Eclipse envirorment

Hallo. I have problems by setting the Eclipse envirorment, can anybody provide me a useful step-by step instruction?
RIM now has a full-featured Eclipse plug-in for BlackBerry development, and you should use it at this point. The above answer links to an outdated guide that does not mention this plugin.
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/devbetasoftware/javaplugin.jsp
this is still not very smooth process. Check out this post, may be it will help:
http://www.blackberryforums.com/developer-forum/138210-setup-up-eclipse-blackberry-development.html
You may want to look at the following RIM walkthrough