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I discourage using the wiki, since much of the information may be outdated and may be more confusing than an actual help.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
I learned the little I know of wxPython (as in: Python wrappers for wx widgets) from the absolutely outstanding demo app: http://wxpython.org/download.php
With that demo app, you get examples for many, many uses of the framework widgets: both code and running UI frames. It is absolutely amazing just how well that is done.
Is there anything even remotely close to that for Eclipse RCP or SWT/JFace?
I have to "port" a concept I developed in wx over to Java.. and I am not sure Swing would cut it. Eclipse RCP or SWT/JFace look extremely good but.. where's the material to help me get started? I Googled but I couldn't find anywhere something that I could download and run.. and see the code behind it!
Note: I could of course "download and run" Eclipse itself.. but that's way more complex that I can probably manage at the moment. There's the brilliance of wx demos: they are even gradual in complexity!
I would start with the vogella website. There you can find all you need to start with. As Alexey Romanov mentioned, the RCP Mail Template is also a really good example, but I'm not sure if Eclipse 4.x is used, but I doubt. So start learning the 4.x platform.
For SWT there is a Demo application showing all the components.For JFaces I also recommend you the JFace Snippets.
The canonical example is the RCP Mail Template (version 2.0). There are more examples listed here and JFace Snippets.
I apologise for the very amateur question about E4 but I am a bit confused about a couple of things about RCP development using the new Eclipse 4 framework. I read in this tutorial that one can no longer use any default commands the way we could in 3.x especially for common things like Save, Save As... in the File menu. It says that in E4 we have to write our own commands. The reason I am confused is because the thing I liked about Eclipse previously is that a lot of things are already implemented and we can just extend that to our own needs. But it feels like now everything must be written from scratch.
That led me to considering reusing the command code already written for Eclipse Juno. I had the Live Editor open so I could see the list of commands etc but I don't really see any Handlers implemented for any of them. Then I used the Spy on Eclipse Juno and checked out some of the menu items and they all seem to point to Actions. That really confused me as I thought Juno was based on E4.
I could be completely wrong so I am sorry for asking such a silly question. I only just started using E4 and need to decide whether one of fairly young Eclipse 3.x projects should be migrated to 4.x.
AfaIk, in Juno the compatibility layer translates the 3.x based implementation of the IDE into E4 concepts. This is also the reason why the reusable commands are not yet available.
If you have an 3.x based RCP it should also run using the compatibility layer (and you can reuse the commands mentioned in your question) if no incompatible APIs have been used.
Here is more information (also a tutorial from Lars Vogel): http://www.vogella.com/articles/Eclipse4CompatibilityLayer/article.html
For me, Eclipse is the IDE to work with when I like to develop a Java application. But I like Swing more than SWT, so I'd like to use the Netbeans Platform for my Application.
Is it possible to develop a Netbeans Platform application in Eclipse? Where can I find information about this?
You are setting out on a great endeavour, and I want to congratulate you on your decision.
With me it is just the same. I love working with MyEclipse and Pulse. To me the Eclispe JDT are still superior to what the NetBeans IDE Editor offers - though I really have to say that the NetBeans Development Team is doing well on catching up ...
Ok, I was just reminded that this is only about questions and answers, so here is the answer:
!!! YES !!! you can develop with Eclipse for NetBeans Platform !!! BUT !!! it will be painful. Using Maven can help - but you will still forfeit all the wirzards available from within NetBeans IDE eventually finding yourself writing a lot of code which could have been generated for you.
In order to stop messing up the Q&A paradigm of this site I would love to refer you the following link on Geertjan's Blog:
http://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/let_s_get_that_netbeans
I frequently revisit this entry to see if there are any new thoughts. Feel free to post there. As far as I can tell this is the best information around at the moment.
Best regards,
Thomas G.
This my seem a little odd but I want to start eclipse (v3.5) in the most minimal version possible. Pherhaps just the core and the ui component without anything else. I'm new to eclipse Plugin Development so I don't really know if this is possible at all?
I googled this topic but there seems to be no useful info out there. Perhaps someone can help me...
Thanks
I found the solution. On this webpage in Section 3 "Create your first RCP application". There a minimal application based on the Extensions
org.eclipse.core.runtime.apllications
org.eclipse.ui.perspectives
is created.