* Welcome Eric Clayberg & Dan Rubel

This week, we're delighted to have Eric Clayberg & Dan Rubel helping to answer questions about the new book Eclipse Plugins. See the table of contents online.

The promotion starts Tuesday, February 3rd 2009 and will end on Friday, February 6th 2009.

We'll be selecting four random posters in this forum to win a free copy of the book provided by the publisher, Addison-Wesley Professional.

Please see the Book Promotion page to ensure your best chances at winning!

Posts in this welcome thread are not eligible for the drawing.

Welcome Eric and Dan to JavaRanch!

Welcome To JavaRanch!

Welcome, and i have one question. How much does eclipse 3.4 plugin development differ from previous versions of IDE. Is it only matter of new features or elementary API has changed as well?

Welcome Eric Clayberg & Dan Rubel. Hope we enjoy your stay here...

Mourougan

Finally an update to the *only* decent eclipse-plugins book

Looking forward to read it !

Is this a good book to have for a beginner in Eclipse. I have tutorials on Eclipse, but confused by the plug-ins. MyEclipse, IceFaces, Spring, etc.

Glad to be here. Dan and I will check in on and off during the day.

I'm still learning Java an the Eclipse envionment. Can I read this book to learn plugins from square one or is there a recommended pre-reading?

Galen Benson wrote:Can I read this book to learn plugins from square one or is there a recommended pre-reading?

Yes. This is the only book you need to get started with Eclipse plugin development.

The only pre-req is Java programming knowledge.

Hi Eric,

thank you for above input. As far as I have seen, the Plugin Book refers to Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede).
Are there references to what kinds of things can be used or should be avoided to be "backward" compatible to 3.3 and eventually 3.2?

We're still having people using 3.2 occasionally - even though it is not recommended to mix those when working on repositories, it would
be of interest to know if the pitfalls are pointed out on regard of backward compatibility.

Thanks and regards,
Peter

Peter Lorenzen wrote:Hi Eric,

thank you for above input. As far as I have seen, the Plugin Book refers to Eclipse 3.4 (Ganymede).
Are there references to what kinds of things can be used or should be avoided to be "backward" compatible to 3.3 and eventually 3.2?

We're still having people using 3.2 occasionally - even though it is not recommended to mix those when working on repositories, it would
be of interest to know if the pitfalls are pointed out on regard of backward compatibility.

Thanks and regards,
Peter

And while we are asking... what about the JDK is 1.6 required?

The 3rd edition only deals with Eclipse 3.4 and does not explicitly cover backward compatibility although that is touched on lightly in a couple places.

The code examples all use JDK 1.5, but that is not required for plugin development. JDK 1.4 is fie as well.

Eric... I hope you get some real meaty plugin questions soon that you can really tear into!

Hi,

I've read the table of contents on amazon, but I still have some questions about what I think are the most interesting (but under-documented) features in the latest Eclipse versions :
- Does it cover the new menu extension point ?
- Does it cover GMF ?
- And the model-to-text and text-to-text modeling and transformation frameworks ?
- And what about writing some custom JDT extensions ? (like, how to create a New Class custom wizard - the Eclipse documentation is mute on this subject)

Anyway, thumbs up for bringing updated documentation to the developers !

Welcome! Thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions!

Welcome To JavaRanch Guys!

Eric Clayberg wrote:The 3rd edition only deals with Eclipse 3.4 and does not explicitly cover backward compatibility although that is touched on lightly in a couple places.

I`m new to plugin development. How much the book gives universal knowledge, if any? If Eclipse 3.5 or higher occurs, will most of rules, API, etc. of plugin development stay the same or there will be potentially totally different stuff to learn?

Marcin Skrzek wrote:How much the book gives universal knowledge, if any? If Eclipse 3.5 or higher occurs, will most of rules, API, etc. of plugin development stay the same or there will be potentially totally different stuff to learn?

The differences between Eclipse 3.4 and 3.5 at this point are minimal and unlikely to affect any of the book content.

That will likely change when Eclipse 4.0 comes out in 2010. We will do a 4th edition for that.

Welcome to JavaRanch and thanks for answering our questions. I have used Eclipse for some of my projects and I'm very interested in RCP part of Eclipse framework for building plugin applications.

As far as I can see from book contents, the most part of the book is for building GUI applications/plugins for Eclipse. Does new book discover of creating custom extentions and extention points for user plugins? And are there some code samples for the book to look into?

Thanks for your answers and it is very nice to see a book that can help to avoid endless digging in eclipse maillists for searching the answers!

Max Galushka wrote:Does new book discover of creating custom extentions and extention points for user plugins?

Chapter 17 is devoted to that.

Max Galushka wrote:And are there some code samples for the book to look into?

Yes...

http://www.qualityeclipse.com/projects/index.html

Does the new book go into utilizing p2 from within applications? I've seen documentation that talks about how to add p2 meta-information to my plugin, but haven't yet found a good source as to how to use p2 to let me implement an auto-update / auto-install feature for my own products.

Great fan of the earlier versions of your book, btw, and excited to see it updated and extended for Ganymede!

Tina Coleman wrote:Does the new book go into utilizing p2 from within applications?

No.

I managed to wrangle up a copy of the second edition from someone at my wife's workplace and went through it last night. I assume the 3rd edition is just as good as the second. It's a great book. Definitely getting it. Thanks

Galen Benson wrote:I assume the 3rd edition is just as good as the second.

It's much better!