Customizing and Extending Eclipse

Duration:	2 days
Type:	advanced

Description

Eclipse is now the dominant IDE within the Java community. However most developers using Eclipse are unaware that it is much more than a development tool.

Eclipse was designed from the beginning as a contribution based project where everything except for a small kernel would be a plug-in. Developers can add their own plug-ins, ranging from single buttons and menu items to complete wizards and power tools. Additionally Eclipse can be used as a framework for building rich client applications for any purpose.

This course provides complete coverage of the different ways in which Eclipse can be extended. Special consideration is given to writing plug-ins that contribute extra refactorings and code generation functionality.

Prerequisites

Delegates should have several years Java programming experience, understand XML and be familiar with developing Java applications using the Eclipse Java IDE. Previous experience of installing Eclipse plug-ins is helpful but not essential.

List of Modules

Introducing Eclipse from the Inside Out

The evolution of Eclipse from Smalltalk

SWT and JFace as an alternative to Swing

The contribution based architecture of Eclipse

The Eclipse workbench and perspectives

Editors, actions and views within a perspective

An overview of plug-in development

An overview of rich client development

The Standard Widget Toolkit

Differences between SWT and Swing/AWT

Commercial and open source SWT tools

Standard SWT widgets and Layout Managers

Listeners and the event handling model

Mapping data to widgets via viewers

Adding support for drag and drop

Creating Plug-Ins

The structure of a basic plug-in

Adding a plug-in class with lifecycle methods

Building and running a plug-in

The lifecycle of plug-ins within Eclipse

Commonly used extension points

Defining new actions and views

Base types used to create extensions

Writing a plug-in with multiple extensions

Making your plug-in extensible

Debugging and unit testing plug-ins

Creating Refactoring Plug-Ins

How Eclipse represents code within the Java IDE

Obtaining a working copy of the code being edited

Reconciling differences and merging compilation units

Changing code via the modifier methods of IType

Changing code by tokenizing the compilation unit

Parsing the compilation unit into an Abstract Syntax Tree

Changing code by altering the Abstract Syntax Tree

Altering the Abstract Syntax Tree via the Visitor Pattern

The Rich Client Platform (RCP)

Designing a new editor for Eclipse

Creating dialog boxes and wizards

Contributing new perspectives

Adding properties and help pages

Packaging an RCP application

Deploying applications via WebStart