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This tutorial will teach you the basics of writing plugins that run inside the Eclipse framework. You will learn about editors, views, and extension points by creating one of each yourself.
There's a few things to do before we dive into the tutorial itself. For example, to do Eclipse programming, you will have to get your hands on an Eclipse installation first. Read through the following sections to get ready for the tutorial tasks.
For this tutorial, we need you to have Eclipse and Git installed:
Over the course of this tutorial, you will be writing a bit of code. Here's a few rules we ask you to follow:
de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login
, where login
is your login name as used for your email address at the institute. From now on, this rule will apply to all tutorials. Once we start with the actual practical projects, we will choose another package name.During the tutorial, we will cover each topic only briefly, so it is always a good idea to find more information online. Here's some more resources that will prove helpful:
You will find that despite of all of these resources Eclipse is still not as well commented and documented as we'd like it to be. Finding out how stuff works in the world of Eclipse can thus sometimes be a challenge. However, this does not only apply to you, but also to many people who are conveniently connected by something called The Internet. It should go without saying that if all else fails, Google often turns up great tutorials or solutions to problems you may run into. And if it doesn't, Miro and I will be happy to help you as well.
We have created a Git repository for everyone to do his tutorials in. You can access the repository online through our Stash tool over here. You will first have to configure your Stash account:
You should now be able to access the repository. Clone it:
ssh://git@git.rtsys.informatik.uni-kiel.de:7999/PRAK/12ws-eclipse-tutorials.git .
(including the final dot, which tells git to clone the repository into the current directory instead of a subdirectory).You will use this repository for all your tutorial work, along with everyone else. To make sure that you don't interfere with each other, everyone will work on a different branch. This is not exactly how people usually use Git, but goes to demonstrate Git's flexibility... Add a branch for you to work in:
git checkout -b login_name
You have just added and checked out a new branch. Everything you commit will go to this branch. To push your local commits to the server (which you will need to do so we can access your results), do the following:
git push origin login_name
You would usually have to enter git pull
first, but since nobody will mess with your branch this won't be necessary. By the way, you only need to mention origin login_name
with the first git push
, since Git doesn't know where to push the branch yet. After the first time, Git remembers the information and it will be enough to just enter git push
.
OK, with all the preliminaries out of the way let's get working. Fire up Eclipse, choose an empty workspace, close the Welcome panel it will present you with and follow the following steps.
For our text editor to integrate into Eclipse, we need to create a plug-in project for it:
de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple
. Uncheck Use default location (which would put the project into your workspace), and put it into your local clone of the Git repository instead (the Location should read something like /path/to/git/repository/de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple
). Click Next.Simple (login)
. Also, make sure that Generate an activator and This plug-in will make contributions to the UI are both checked. Click Finish. (Eclipse might ask you whether you want to switch to the Plug-in Development Perspective, which configures Eclipse to provide the views that are important for plug-in development. Choose Yes. Or No. It won't have a big influence on your future...)plugin.xml
and META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
. (By the way, this would be a great time to research the editor and the two files online.) Basically, those two files provide information that tell Eclipse what other plug-ins your plug-in needs and how it works together with other plug-ins by providing extensions and extension points. Our new plug-in will depend on two other plug-ins, so switch to the Dependencies tab of the editor and add dependencies to org.eclipse.ui.editors
and org.eclipse.jface.text
. Save the editor and close it. (You can always reopen it by opening one of the two mentioned files from the Package Explorer.)We will now create the class that implements the simple text editor. There won't be any programming involved here since we're lazy; instead, we will just inherit from an existing simple text editor.
de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple.editors
. Name: SimpleEditorPart
. Superclass: org.eclipse.ui.editors.text.TextEditor
. Click Finish.For the editor to be available inside Eclipse, we will have to register it by adding an extension to an extension point.
org.eclipse.ui.editors
extension point and click Finish.de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple.editor
, the name to Simple Text Editor
, the icon to icons/turing-file.gif
, the extensions to simple
, the class to de.cau.cs.rtprakt.login.simple.editors.SimpleEditorPart
, and the default to true
.It's time to test your new simple editor in a new Eclipse instance.
test
as the project name.test.simple
. This will create a new file with that name and open the file in your newly added text editor. (You can see that it is your editor by looking at the editor icon, which should look like the icon you downloaded and put into the icons folder.)WRITE THIS SECTION
WRITE THIS SECTION