Eclipse Plug-ins [Paperback]

— 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

• 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