Eclipse Plug-ins (3rd Edition): Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins eBook: Eric Clayberg, Dan Rubel: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Review

“I’m often asked, ‘What are the best books about Eclipse?’ Number one on my list, every time, is Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins. I find it to be the clearest and most relevant book about Eclipse for the real-world software developer. Other Eclipse books focus on the internal Eclipse architecture or on repeating the Eclipse documentation, whereas this book is laser focused on the issues and concepts that matter when you’re trying to build a product.”

— Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Director, Open Source Process, Eclipse Foundation

“As the title suggests, this massive tome is intended as a guide to best practices for writing Eclipse plug-ins. I think in that respect it succeeds handily. Before you even think about distributing a plug-in you’ve written, read this book.”

— Ernest Friedman-Hill

Sheriff, JavaRanch.com

“If you’re looking for just one Eclipse plug-in development book that will be your guide, this is the one. While there are other books available on Eclipse, few dive as deep as

Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins.”

— Simon Archer

“Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins was an invaluable training aid for all of our team members. In fact, training our team without the use of this book as a base would have been virtually impossible. It is now required reading for all our developers and helped us deliver a brand-new, very complex product on time and on budget thanks to the great job this book does of explaining the process of building plug-ins for Eclipse.”

— Bruce Gruenbaum

“This is easily one of the most useful books I own. If you are new to developing Eclipse plug-ins, it is a ‘must-have’ that will save you lots of time and effort. You will find lots of good advice in here, especially things that will help add a whole layer of professionalism and completeness to any plug-in. The book is very focused, well-structured, thorough, clearly written, and doesn’t contain a single page of ‘waffly page filler.’ The diagrams explaining the relationships between the different components and manifest sections are excellent and aid in understanding how everything fits together. This book goes well beyond Actions, Views, and Editors, and I think everyone will benefit from the authors’ experience. I certainly have.”

— Tony Saveski

“The authors of this seminal book have decades of proven experience with the most productive and robust software engineering technologies ever developed. Their experiences have now been well applied to the use of Eclipse for more effective Java development. A must-have for any serious software engineering professional!”

— Ed Klimas

“Just wanted to also let you know this is an excellent book! Thanks for putting forth the effort to create a book that is easy to read and technical at the same time!”

— Brooke Hedrick

“The key to developing great plug-ins for Eclipse is understanding where and how to extend the IDE, and that’s what this book gives you. It is a must for serious plug-in developers, especially those building commercial applications. I wouldn’t be without it.”

— Brian Wilkerson

Product Description

Producing a commercial-quality plug-in means going above and beyond the minimal requirements needed to integrate with Eclipse. It means attending to all those details that contribute to the “fit and polish” of a commercial offering. This comprehensive guide covers the entire process of plug-in development, including all the extra steps needed to achieve the highest quality results.

Building on two internationally best-selling previous editions, Eclipse Plug-ins, Third Edition, has been fully revised to reflect the powerful new capabilities of Eclipse 3.4. Leading Eclipse experts Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel present detailed, practical coverage of every aspect of plug-in development, as well as specific, proven solutions for the challenges developers are most likely to encounter.

All code examples, relevant API listings, diagrams, and screen captures have been thoroughly updated to reflect both the Eclipse 3.4 API and the latest Java syntax. In addition, Clayberg and Rubel have completely revamped their popular Favorites View case study, reworking much of its content and recreating its code from scratch. The authors carefully cover new functionality added to existing Eclipse features, such as views and editors, and fully explain brand-new features such as Commands, GEF, and PDE Build.

This extensively revised edition

Thoroughly covers Eclipse’s new preferences
Illuminates the powerful new Eclipse Command Framework, which replaces Eclipse’s older Action Framework
Presents extensive new discussions of using commands with views and editors
Introduces Mylyn, the new task-focused interface that reduces information overload and simplifies multi-tasking
Contains an all-new chapter on using the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) to build dynamic, interactive graphical user interface elements
Walks you step by step through the entire PDE Build process
Shows how to create update sites with p2, which replaces Eclipse’s old Update Manager

This book is designed for every experienced developer interested in extending the Eclipse platform, the Rational Software Development Platform, or any other platform that supports Eclipse plug-ins.

See all Product Description

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

A Good Step by Step Guide 30 May 2011

By Andrew Pleasants

Format:Paperback

I bought this book as some background reading for my masters project - which as you can possibly guess was to build an Eclipse plug-in.

I thought the book was very useful, it takes a kind of step by step guide into creating a plug-in with different features and there is a full worked example they progress through the book with (which I find quite useful). What is missing is more advanced things that we required, such as the Graphical Editing Framework and Eclipse Modelling Framework, which were only covered in brief (I suppose this I can only expect).

The reason I highly recommend this book to new Eclipse developers is that there isn't a huge number of good sources out there, and this book also provides a reference list at the end of each chapter; which makes it good for students who need to cross reference.

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great book 1 Mar 2010

By Adrian Paleacu

Great book. Congrats. I don't consider myself an eclipse plug-in expert but the chapters 1 trough 5 are quite basic eclipse usability (206 pages). After performing a crash course in eclipse osgi the first chapters are only for beginners. I don't know they put those into this book, I mean you don't start coding on osgi, rcp without any eclipse background. And having such a huge say about rcp in general, it's spoil somehow the book. Anyway... great book!

thanks,
--adi

Very thorough but not well organised 16 Jan 2010

By Frank B. Jacobsen

We bought this book in my company to extend Eclipse with our own plugins to support our own software framework.

To use it, you really have to sit down and work through every chapter, but sometimes you have to skip a lot of certainly useful, but not relevant at that point, information.

This way it falls between the chairs of being a tutorial and a reference.

Eclipse is developing fast, and of course this only covers 3.3 and 3.4, where Eclipse is currently at 3.5. The information is still usefull, but you have to make allowance for the differences.

Also, a few things are missing. E.g. to layout things properly, you have to call layout() or pack() on your SWT composite graphical objects, when you change it. This took me a long time to figure out, as it not mentioned, not even in the sample code.

Also, the downloadable code is updated to support the newest Eclipse version, but still even the original code is not in sync with the text.

On the other hand, we have been helped along tremendously, the Eclipse plug-in developement environment may be documented well at the API level, but we have not found any tutorial introduction other than this.