Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (I)
24 January 2008The Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) provides a set of tools that assist the developer in every stage of plug-in development from genesis to deployment. The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) is freely distributed as part of the Eclipse SDK, and serves as a good example of an Eclipse-based IDE tool.
In PDE, each plug-in under development is represented by a single Java project. Plug-in projects have certain unique characteristics that make them what they are; for example, each has a plug-in descriptor (a manifest and/or a plugin.xml file), a dynamic classpath based on dependencies specified in the descriptor, special builders, and other configuration properties. PDE provides a plug-in creation wizard that creates plug-in projects populated with the required essentials.
PDE comes with a special multi-page editor that makes plug-in development easier. The Plug-in Manifest Editor actually spans three files—the bundle manifest (META-INF/MANIFEST.MF), plugin.xml, and build.properties. It allows you to edit all properties necessary to describe a plug-ins basic run-time requirements, dependencies, extensions, extension points, and so on.
Do read the next post on this one.
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- PDE Concepts (II)
- Creating a Simple Plug-in using PDE (I)
- Building a Rich Client Platform application (I)
- Running a plug-in
- Plugin project - Dependencies page (II)
- Creating a Simple Plug-in using PDE (II)
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