I am new to to Eclipse RCP and SWT/JFace. I intend to purchase the Second Edition of the well known Eclipse Rich Client Platform book by Jeff McAffer, Jean-Michel Lemieux, Chris Aniszczyk. I wish to know from people who have read any of the editions of the book whether the book serves as a good introduction to both the topics (RCP and SWT/JFace)? Or would I need separate reading material for SWT/JFace?
I read the first edition of the book in 2007 when I started a project with Eclipse RCP development.
It was a really useful introduction on how to build RCP applications and what concepts are used by Eclipse.
Two other books that I read later are good follow-ups when you finished that book:
Eclipse plug-ins by Eric Clayberg & Dan Rubel
Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins by Erich Gamma & Kent Beck
Although the second one is a bit dated, the concepts explained are still the same in the heart of Eclipse.
Another thing I did to learn more Eclipse RCP/JFace/SWT was to look at the source code of two great open-source projects built on Eclipse:
RSSOwl
MP3M by Kai Tödter
MP3M is especially interesting since the author tries to keep it up to date with the changes that newer Eclipse versions bring to the platform.
Related
I have been using eclipse GEF 3.x for developing graphical editors. While there are many examples for this framework, GEF4 doesn't seem to have many. Since gef4 is rewritten based on Java fx, putting up more examples will popularize the framework. For instance after doing lot of searching I found out that IVisualPart Is used instead of IEditorPart. Any pointers to a comprehensive example would be helpful
The GEF repository at GitHub contains examples for the individual components, i.a. the "MVC Logo Example" that demonstrates usage of the MVC technology stack that is offered by GEF for the development of graphical applications, and the "Zest Graph Example" that demonstrates usage of the Zest technology stack that is offered by GEF for the development of graph-based graphical applications.
Moreover, you can register for a free GEF tutorial here: https://info.itemis.com/en/gef/tutorials/
The terminology was changed from IEditPart and IEditPolicy to IVisualPart and IPolicy. Moreover, IVisualPart is divided into IContentPart, IFeedbackPart, and IHandlePart. For details, take a look at the documentation in the GitHub Wiki, especially the MVC documentation.
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.
I am working with Eclipse Plugin development since 3 year but now i want to move to Eclipse RCP and RAP. I had tried and found it is bit similar and common things to work.
Now I want a better way to start with RCP and RAP. please share me what are the points that i have to take care and please share me some good tutorial link.
I had tried to search over google but getting a quit sure shot link.
There are no real differences between RCP and Eclipse IDE applications, except maybe a reduced set of plug-ins to rely on (but they can be brought back). What you might have to take extra care is branding (and theming), and packaging (possible via products). Some RCP tutorials to start with:
Eclipse 4 RCP
Old, 3.x RCP API
Products and deployment
In case of RAP, the difference is bigger, as you have to manage the different sessions of different users, and theming is more important. A tutorial for the RAP-based issues (including tips for single sourcing RCP and RAP applications) are available from eclipsesource.com.
A final note: if you are starting a brand new project, I'd rather experiment a bit with the 4.x API, as it is simpler to manage between RCP and RAP.
Another source of information about Eclipse RAP in particular is the official RAP Developers Guide which can be found on the Eclipse Foundation website:
http://eclipse.org/rap/developers-guide/
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'm just curious if anybody has an idea of how wide-spread the use of eclipse is in universities/faculties around the world.
The reason for which i'm asking this question is that i'm under the impression that netbeans is BY FAR more used in the academic world than eclipse, yet i hear so many great things about eclipse. I would have thought that eclipse should have the upper hand in universities since it also supports swt in addition to swing. And at first-glance OO programming seems to have a greater support in eclipse than in netbeans.
Also it defines concepts like extension points for which i can't find equivalents in netbeans.Overall it seems more oriented towards developing "loosely-coupled" components. Then again my experience with eclipse is close to null so it may be that i am mistaking and it really isn't that good.
I am a PhD student in Budapest University of Technology and Economics. During the years of my BSc and MSC education I took several courses where we could use different IDES, such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio or even Emacs, and there was no single IDE put forward as the future.
However, the Eclipse platform as a good plug-in based modeling and programming environment is quite interesting in academic research: the well-known Mylyn project was started during PhD, half of the Eclipse Modeling projects are more or less research projects, and I am really sure that there are many more research projects based on Eclipse. And this might mean, that there is interest in knowing Eclipse more deeply.
About the popularity and SWT support - I don't think that matters, but what the lecturers have actual experience in. And I think, that is the most important thing.
From my experience graduating with a PhD in CS from the University of British Columbia, I can say that Eclipse is the only IDE that is really used in undergrad classes. Some of the more systemsy classes will use Emacs, but most will use Eclipse. In the 4th year Software engineering course, all students are expected to create their own Eclipse plugin.
Perhaps, the bias towards Eclipse comes from the fact that the grad school does get significant funding from IBM and the Eclipse Foundation. Many grad students implement their thesis ideas as plugins for Eclipse (I was no exception). But, more than just money, Eclipse is a very lively open-source community, it is extremely modular, and the funding the grad students get tends to be with little strings attached.
On top of that, when going to Software engineering-oriented conferences (such as OOPSLA or ICSE), you'll find that the vast majority of papers that provide IDE integration will do so with Eclipse (Visual Studio is a distant second, and I can't think of a single NetBeans-based research paper off the top of my head).
All of these things seem to show that Eclipse is a popular playground for academic research. And this shows why it is also popular with undergrads. Undergrads like using Eclipse because it is seen as an essential job skill, whereas NetBeans is not considered this way from what I can see.
(Disclaimer- after using Eclipse to complete my PhD, I am now project lead on an Eclipse project, and contribute to several others.)
I can only offer my own experience:
I'm taking the Computer Science MSc at Imperial College, London. The only "IDE" we were taught was Emacs. There's a strong emphasis on learning the language essentials and then it's left up to the student to choose which IDE to go for. (We were briefly introduced to Eclipse in the 2-day "Intro to Java Course" and I think it was used in the concurrency course too, although I didn't take concurrency.)
That said, I've been using Eclipse for most of my projects and many of my course mates and many of my tutors use Eclipse but a fair few use Netbeans as well. I wouldn't want to guess which is the most used. Both Eclipse and Netbeans are both installed on the university CS department machines.
I am taking a Computer Science BSc at University of Manchester, UK. Like Jack Kelly, we weren't shown to use IDE's as we were encouraged to use vi and others editors.
We did have a single lab exercise using Eclipse and another using Netbeans.
Netbeans was useful if you were creating GUI's but overall I prefer Eclipse.
Now that IntelliJ has an open version, perhaps we will see it being used more in Academia..
NetBeans has been eclipsed by Eclipse.
Knowing Eclipse well is a marketable skill.
Well my professor swears by Eclipse - Eclipse has many books written about it. It has a huge amount of 3rd-party add-on functionality.
Sure, NetBeans is a respectable and excellent IDE. But Eclipse just has more eyes scanning it and thus is updated and fixed more often too.
I can comment that it's used in CS 61B at Berkeley (the lower division Data Structures course, taught in Java). I don't really know much else, unfortunately.
Java lecturers in TAMK Polytechnic in Finland teach with Eclipse. Thatt said, I prefer Netbeans by far, and I've found it installed in most machines there.