Eclipse Plug-in functionality Research

Throughout the Java™ developer community, Eclipse is widely known for its industry-leading Java Development Tools (JDT). But Eclipse was built to facilitate the use of plug-ins, and in this respect it has been surprisingly successful. Explore some of the capabilities that have been built into the Eclipse plug-in, such as programming with other languages such as Ruby, or building interactive multimedia using environments such as OpenLaszlo.

Brief introduction

More and more Java developers have begun to appreciate the productivity and quality benefits provided by Eclipse's JDT. Eclipse's support for writing Java code is great. Its Java editor provides syntax highlighting, formatting, folding, content aids, code templates, and much more, and most of us can't imagine what it would be like to leave them. Its growing set of available refactoring and code generation capabilities allows you to manipulate code at a higher level and automate common code-intensive and error-prone tasks. Also, after you have developed the code and used JDT to unit test your code with the built-in support for writing and executing JUnit tests, you can use the Eclipse's first-class Java debugger to debug any problems that you encounter at run time.

In addition to JDT, Eclipse sdk--'s most popular eclipse.org downloads-also includes Plug-in Development environment (PDE). PDE extends JDT to build Eclipse Plug-ins using specific features--basic building blocks for eclipse based applications. In fact, using the tools provided by Eclipse itself can go beyond Java development, extend existing Eclipse applications, or even create new applications.

Summary of all Plug-ins

If you have ever used Eclipse, you may experience the term "plug-in". On the architecture, Eclipse consists of a small run-time layer that contains many functional modules or so-called "plug-ins" in Eclipse terminology. A plug-in is a component that provides all the functionality in an Eclipse application. They collaborate with their APIs to deliver the final results. In Eclipse, even the most basic features, such as locating and starting the installed Plug-ins, are encapsulated in Plug-ins.

To extend or build on existing Eclipse functionality, Plug-ins contribute specific extensions to extension points exposed by other plug-ins. Typically, plug-ins focus on specific areas of responsibility and assign other responsibilities to other plug-ins through one or more extension points. For example, a plug-in allows you to visually compare the contents of two files in parallel, but it will not care how to read them or even explain the structure of those files; This is the work of other plug-ins. When comparing two files, the plug-in first checks to see if there is another plug-in that can interpret the structure of the files. If one is found, it asks the found plug-in for information about the file structure and uses that information during the comparison.

As you can see, the modular architecture provides Eclipse with great flexibility and provides a platform to support a large number of applications that the original designer did not anticipate.

Install Eclipse Plug-in

When you find new Plug-ins online, you may find them in the form of downloadable files--zip or JAR files. The publisher of the plugin should provide installation instructions. Typically, standalone plug-ins that are published as JAR files can be saved directly to the plug-in directory in the Eclipse installation (Eclipse directory). In some cases, multiple plug-ins may be packaged together, and files may be placed in a directory of Plug-ins. If this is the case, you must extract the profile into your eclipse directory. After you install the new plug-in, you must restart the workbench for the changes to take effect.

Note: When you restart the Eclipse Workbench (Eclipse-clean), be sure to add-clean to the command line. This will ensure that your Eclipse plug-in configuration is up to date.

Multiple Plug-ins can also be published as an attribute (feature). Eclipse Update Manager is part of a workbench that uses the concept of attributes as a way to group related plug-ins for easy installation and configuration. In this case, the only difference you will notice is that the published profile contains an attribute directory other than the plugin directory.

Update Manager is a powerful tool for managing and keeping Eclipse configurations up to date. For more information about how to use Update Manager, see Workbench User Guide > Tasks > Updating features with the update man in Eclipse Help Ager.

Universal IDE

At the time of its initial release, Eclipse was touted as a versatile tool-integration platform with a rich set of Java development tools. It is the desire of the development tool industry leader to adopt Eclipse as the underlying platform for the best pedigree tool.

In the end, Eclipse has fulfilled its promise. The number of available Eclipse IDE Plug-ins and even the entire development suite is growing. Eclipse Foundation alone oversees the development of a number of projects that extend the original Eclipse IDE in other programming languages and platforms. More and more companies are starting to join Eclipse Foundation, and more and more new projects are being created and contributed.

Enterprise Java and Web application Development

Although Java programming is often required for developing EE applications, other technologies are needed. Therefore, building enterprise-class software requires a whole new set of tools.

Eclipse Foundation itself manages Web Tools Project (WTP), which tries to provide a tool and tool framework for developing Java EE Web applications. Although many Eclipse-based Java EE Development kits have not been around for long in the commercial market, WTP is still relatively new. It is in fact a combination of the following three subprojects: Web Standard Tools (WST), Java EE Standard Tools (JST), and Server Faces (JSF) tools.

WST provides a rich editor for many WEB standards, such as HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, XML Schema, XSLT, SOAP, WSDL, SQL, and so on. It also supports the deployment and monitoring of WEB artifacts on a range of HTTP servers.

JST expands the collection of features to support the development of fully functional multi-tier Java application applications. With JST, you can create dynamic WEB applications that use JSPs and servlet, as well as EJB components and WEB services. You can also edit the deployment descriptor for all components and test your application directly in a workbench on many supported Java EE application servers.

JSF Tools is designed to add support for developing a JSF-based WEB application. It is a new subproject with only one published milestone, but it is scheduled to be included in the WTP V1.5 release.

Many commercial software development kits can be used to support the creation of Java EE applications. Ibm®rational®application Developer for websphere® covers several phases of the enterprise software development lifecycle, including design, development, testing, deployment, and configuration management of Java EE applications.

To support the creation of a dynamic WEB application, BEA's Workshop Studio uses its patented Appxray technology to track and verify the state of the application. It also includes the HIBERNATE-TO-EJB3 ORM Mapping Workbench and support for the Spring framework.

The MyEclipse IDE, developed by Genuitec, is a low-cost alternative to a large development suite. It provides a complete set of Java EE Development tools for open source technologies (such as Spring, Hibernate, Tapestry, and Struts).