Contributing to Eclipse

Book Excerpts

Eclipse is more than just an IDE. The official enigmatic description is that "Eclipse is a universal tool platform, an open extensible integrated development environment (IDE) for anything and nothing in particular." These excerpts from Erich Gamma and Kent Beck's book Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins give you the flavor of creating plug-ins for the Eclipse platform.

The first download is Chapter 3, "Hello World." This tutorial shows you how to create a "contribution" for Eclipse. The architecture of Eclipse is to have a "tiny little kernel to which many things are contributed." This chapter shows you how to create a button for the toolbar. When you press it, a dialog box pops up with the obligatory "Hello World."

The second download is Chapter 12, "Interlude: Test-Driven Plug-In Development." This book revisits developing using TDD instead of the exploratory style presented in earlier chapters. In order to test plug-ins, you need "an extended version of JUnit that takes care of initializing Eclipse and that runs the tests inside an Eclipse workspace. This is the purpose of PDE JUnit."

These book excerpts are from "Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins" by Erich Gamma and Kent Beck, ISBN 0321205758, copyright 2004. All
rights reserved.

These chapters are posted with permission from Addison-Wesley. In fact, we originally requested just chapter 12, and they responded that they felt that chapter 3 was more representative. We agreed to switch to offer chapter 3 and they were kind enough to allow us to post both chapters for you.

We are presenting these book excerpts as two PDF downloads. The Chapter 3 file size is a little over 500 KB. Download Chapter 3: "Hello World". The Chapter 12 file size is a little over 200 KB. Download Chapter 12: "Interlude: Test-Driven Plug-In Development".