Contributing to Eclipse - Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins

"Even long-time Eclipse committers will be surprised by the breadth and depth of this book. A must-read for every new Eclipse extender." --Andre Weinand, Eclipse Committer Contributing to Eclipse offers A quick step-by-step tutorial. Have your first plug-in running in less than an hour. An introduction to test-driven plug-in development. Confidently create higher quality plug-ins. The Rules of Eclipse. Seamlessly integrate your contributions with the rest of Eclipse. A design pattern tour of Eclipse. A cook's tour of Eclipse with patterns. A comprehensive tutorial. See all the techniques necessary to write production-quality contributions. Erich Gamma and Kent Beck introduce you quickly, yet thoroughly, to Eclipse, the emerging environment for software development. Instead of simply walking you through the actions you should take, Contributing to Eclipse , with its many sidebars, essays, and forward pointers, guides you through Eclipse. You will not just do . You will also understand . Whether you need to get up to speed immediately or want to better understand the design rationale behind Eclipse, Contributing to Eclipse is the Eclipse resource for you. 0321205758B10142003 The Barnes & Noble Review For many developers, modeling is like flossing. You know you probably should, but you can t stand the hassle. But what if someone gave you the key benefits of modeling with a far lower cost of entry ? Someone has. And there s more. The Eclipse Modeling Framework is free. It s part of the open source Eclipse project, which is building a truly awesome collection of integrated, commercial-quality developer tools. (Let s be more precise. Eclipse is a platform for developing whatever new tool your heart desires and integrating your tool with others doing likewise. But many of the 3 million developers who ve downloaded Eclipse did so for the tools that already exist, especially Eclipse s state-of-the-art Java development environment.) We digress. Let s get back to models. When you think about them, you think UML: class diagrams, collaboration diagrams, state diagrams, and so forth. That usually means expensive OOA/D tools. Once you ve done all that modeling, then what? While you can generate code from the model, quite a few organizations use it primarily as documentation. No wonder folks can t be bothered. Now, compare and contrast with EMF. EMF uses XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) to define models. You can create XMI with your fave-rave XML or text editor or export it from the modeler you already own. But most folks will build EMF models a third way: by annotating Java interfaces with model properties, within the Eclipse IDE. No expensive tools. No Everest-scale learning curves. Once you ve built your model, EMF s generator can create corresponding Java implementation classes for you. If you edit these classes with your own methods and instance variables, you can still regenerate them from the model. If you wish - and it s up to you - you can integrate modeling and programming as never before. Meanwhile, EMF s handling all sorts of nitty tasks for you, such as model change notification. Excited yet? Then read Eclipse Modeling Framework . Authored by a team of IBMers at the heart of the Eclipse project, it s all you need to know to get results with EMF. A little Java experience is all you need: The authors cover every detail of defining EMF models and generating code from them. They review all three ways to define EMF models and carefully walk through the powerful Ecore metamodel. There s extensive coverage of using the EMF Generator and its associated patterns, with a chapter-length case study. You ll find plenty of tips for building the best possible models, too - and these authors have done more EMF modeling than anyone. The book ends with a complete Quick Reference to the EMF 1.1 API and to EMF.Edit API, which provides generic, reusable classes for building editors for EMF models. By the time you get there, you ll be raring to go. Bill Camarda Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include (http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0789718529) Special Edition Using Word 2000 and (http://cart2.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0764505424) Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition . This book encourages tool building by laying bare the design of an excellent tool platform, Eclipse, and encourages design by building a typical tool extending Eclipse. This tutorial on creating custom tools also provides an explanation of a highly effective software design philosophy. The authors revive the lost art of supporting existing work by building tools. This book improves the software developers skill set by building little tools, and gradually growing those tools into better-than-professional quality products to help a whole community of developers. This book revives that highly-effective practice of tool writing and provides lessons along the way that tool building and design are two of the most leveraged skills for software developers. Intended for Java tool developers who may or may not be familiar with Eclipse, this guide introduces the Eclipse development environment, outlines the process of building a simple plug-in, and describes the standard widget toolkit and JFace. It then shows how to use actions, views, editors, change tracking, perspectives, dialogs, wizards, preference pages, properties, builders, markers, natures, and extension points in an example "favorites" plug-in. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) A guide to building commercial-quality extensions for both Eclipse and IBM's Web Sphere Studio Workbench. It serves as a systematic reference for experienced Eclipse users. It introduces the tools you need to build Eclipse and Web Sphere plug-ins. It explains the Eclipse architecture and the structure of plug-ins and extension points. Part of the "Eclipse Series", this book unifies Java', XML, and UML - enabling students to construct applications based on simple models. In this book, leading EMF implementers illuminate various facets of using EMF for both modeling and code generation.