Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) for software. It also represents an ideal, incorporating modularity, extensibility, and community. Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins is therefore significantly more than a book about how to write plug-ins for the Eclipse framework. The book--by software patterns guru Erich Gamma and "extreme programming" exponent Kent Beck--explains how new Eclipse modules should interact with existing software elements, and make themselves further extensible. It also emphasizes the importance of packaging new plug-ins and making them available to others as new Eclipse features. The book's emphasis is on community, and helping the Eclipse project grow and improve.

That said, this book is an excellent how-to guide. Gamma and Beck take the time to carefully detail a couple of model plug-in projects--including the industry-standard Hello World exercise--and take care to explain the highly visual Eclipse development process one step at a time. They don't unleash bushels of source code on the reader, but nonetheless manage to walk the reader through a series of progressively more elaborate extension projects that exercise some of the most exciting parts of the Eclipse framework. As you'd expect from a book involving Gamma, discussion of patterns appears with increasing frequency toward the book's conclusion, enabling the reader to expand on the authors' shared wisdom and understand the Eclipse design better. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to extend the Eclipse development environment--both in the narrow sense of writing code that makes the software do something new, and in the broad sense of participating in the Eclipse community. Specific coverage addresses extension points, markers, perspectives, and help. There's also a guide to the Eclipse architecture, framed as a series of "pattern stories."


From Book News, Inc.
This book explains how to extend Eclipse for software projects and how to use Eclipse to create software tools that improve development time. It serves as a tutorial on creating custom tools and promotes an overall software design philosophy based the building and applying of new tools to support of existing work. The authors are programmers and software developers.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


From the Back Cover
"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


About the Author

Kent Beck consistently challenges software engineering dogma, promoting ideas like patterns, test-driven development, and Extreme Programming. Currently affiliated with Three Rivers Institute and Agitar Software, he is the author of many Addison-Wesley titles. Dr. Erich Gamma is technical director at the Software Technology Center of Object Technology International in Zurich, Switzerland.




Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Humans need to feel nurtured and cared for. Humans also need to nurture and care for others. Fulfilling the need to nurture and be nurtured is what makes becoming a fully functioning Eclipse programmer so satisfying. This experience is wrapped in all sorts of rational explanations--"productivity," "time-to-market," "leverage." Eclipse is a productive environment in which to work, and contributing to it makes it more so. The right contributions written by the right person can create a highly leveraged reduction in time-to-market. While these explanations are true, though, they aren't the point. Working in Eclipse feels good to us because our needs are being taken care of by our environment. When we have a programming problem, there is an Eclipse feature that helps us with it. Contributing to Eclipse feels good to us because we know we are adding to that nurturing feeling of nurturing for ourselves and other programmers. When our contributions enable others to make further contributions of their own, a positive feedback loop appears. That positive feedback feels satisfying.Contributing to Eclipse also has the potential to become an exciting business proposition. You can use Eclipse to ship fully featured products, or you can ship contributions that extend existing products.Eclipse is powerful--personally, professionally, and socially. But there is a daunting amount of information necessary to join the cycle of contribution. We hope reading this book will help you get over this initial hurdle and begin contributing.Eclipse is good news and bad news for developers who like writing tools for developers. The good news is that the platform is incredibly powerful and the internal developers have followed all the rules in creating the Eclipse Java development tools. The bad news is that Eclipse has a strong world view. If you want to play nicely in Eclipse's sandbox, you need to learn the rules.Beginning with Eclipse feels a bit like parachuting blindfolded into Bangkok (this analogy doesn't apply to Thai programmers). When you land you know you need food and shelter, but how are you going to get it? How can you map your clear desires onto the resources available?Overcoming this feeling of dislocation is the primary goal of Contributing to Eclipse. If you parachuted into Bangkok with a guide, you could say, "I'm hungry," and your guide would say, "Here's the kind of place you can get a meal." Similarly, we can listen to, "I want to build such and so," and tell you, "This should be its own perspective, that is an object contribution, and you'll need a new editor for that."When you are finished with this book, you won't have a complete map of Eclipse, but you'll know at least one place to get each of your basic needs met. You will also know the rules through which you can play well with others. It's as if we draw you a map of Bangkok marked with six streets, a restaurant, and a hotel. You won't know everything, but you'll know enough to survive, and enough to learn more.When you learn Eclipse, you'll spend much more time reading code than writing code. You will have to grow accustomed to incredibly productive days in which you spend six hours reading and one hour typing. After you become familiar with Eclipse culture, you'll "just know" how to solve more and more problems. However, you'll always solve problems by copying the structure of solutions to similar problems, whether by mimicking Eclipse structure or the structure of your own previous efforts. As we walk together through our example, we won't pretend that we perfectly remember all the details. Instead, we'll show you how we found structure to mimic. Learning to effectively use Eclipse's search facilities is part of becoming an Eclipse contributor.This book is not intended for beginners just learning to use Eclipse. We assume a familiarity with the vocabulary of Eclipse--views, editors, and so on. Once you've used Eclipse for a while, you are likely to come up with ideas for extending it. That's when this book comes into play.When we laid out Contributing to Eclipse, we had a daunting stack of concepts to cover. If we tried to tell you about all 2,000 ideas in Eclipse, though, we would have a book that would cut off the circulation to your lower extremities. In deference to your feet, we've chosen the 50 things that we think are most important for getting you started. Many chapters conclude with "Forward Pointers," places in the code where you can explore the extension of the concepts covered in the chapter. When we teach Eclipse, this is exactly the structure we use--"Why don't you look at the org.eclipse.core.runtime manifest?"Once there was a doctoral student who had to take a qualifying exam about fruit. He only had enough time, though, to learn about cucumbers. When the time came for the exam, the first question was, "Tell us about the tomato." "You see," he said, "the tomato, like the cucumber, is actually a fruit. The cucumber is 80 percent water, has a disease-resistant skin, and is used in salads." Every question that came up, he answered with cucumber facts.We know cucumbers. Except in our case, there are two cucumbers: patterns and JUnit. You'll find pattern-y advice throughout the book. In fact, we were uncomfortable with writing until we started writing the Rules. Once we had the concept of Rules, we could proceed happily. The Rules are really patterns in a micro format.JUnit, our second cucumber, is the basis for the running example. We wrote JUnit in a few hours in a plane over the Atlantic in 1997. Since then, it seems much of our technical lives have revolved around it. JUnit is fertile ground for an Eclipse example because the core--running tests--is simple but the implications--the presentation of tests and results--have barely been explored.We did want to warn you, though, that if you're tired of hearing about patterns and JUnit, this is probably not the book for you.Conventions Used in This BookThe following formatting conventions are used throughout the book: Bold--Used for the names of user-interface elements, including menus, buttons, tabs, and text boxes. Italic--Used for filenames and URLs. Also, new terms are italicized for emphasis. Courier--Used for all code samples and for in-text references to code elements. Plug-in names and elements of XML files also appear in this font. Courier Bold--Used to emphasize portions of code samples, in particular insertions or changes. Courier Strikethrough--Used in code samples to indicate where text should be deleted.In the example presented in Parts II and III, we use specific icons to indicate our current activity: Searching--Shown when we search and explore the Eclipse code. Mimicking--Shown when we present code and XML markup from Eclipse. Testing--Shown when we present code from a JUnit test.Online ExamplesThe Web site for this book is located at www.awprofessional.com/titles/0321205758. A snapshot of all the source code developed throughout this book can be downloaded from there. The site will also provide an errata list and other news related to the book.To use the examples, the Eclipse SDK (Version 2.1.1) is required. You can find a build of the Eclipse SDK for your platform by visiting www.eclipse.org/downloads/.

0321205758P10242003

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Developers have grown accustomed to tools that force you to work more or less the way they want you to. But it hasn￯﾿ﾽt always been that way. Some may remember the heyday of Smalltalk, which treated every user as a potential programmer. (Don￯﾿ﾽt like the way your editor works? Change it.) Now, there￯﾿ﾽs an open source software project that brings that philosophy back to life: Eclipse.

From the outset, Eclipse has envisioned an endless ￯﾿ﾽContribution Circle￯﾿ﾽ that benefits everyone involved. Users become configurers, thoroughly adjusting Eclipse to their unique needs. Configurers become extenders, plugging in new functionality they￯﾿ﾽve created. Extenders become publishers, sharing their functionality with the world. Publishers become enablers, providing hooks others can use to further extend the contributions they￯﾿ﾽve published. Finally, having earned the trust of the community, enablers become committers, able to contribute changes to the source code in the global Eclipse release. Contributing to Eclipse is about becoming part of that contribution circle -- and reaping its benefits.

Authored by the legendary Erich Gamma (Design Patterns' ￯﾿ﾽGang of Four￯﾿ﾽ) and Kent Beck (of Extreme Programming fame), this book has three goals. First, using plenty of examples, it thoroughly explains the basic concepts and details you need in order to contribute to Eclipse at any level. Second, it teaches you how to learn even more about Eclipse, whenever you need to know it. Third, maybe most important -- and not surprising, given who wrote it -- the book is a primer on Eclipse￯﾿ﾽs sophisticated design principles. Of course, those principles aren￯﾿ﾽt just relevant to Eclipse, but to any system you might be involved with.

The authors begin by walking you through the Eclipse architecture at a high level, then setting you up for plug-in development, and walking you through just about the simplest possible example (You￯﾿ﾽll add a button to the toolbar. When you click the button, a dialog box will appear, announcing -- yup, the old standby -- Hello World.)

Next, you￯﾿ﾽll drill down with a more detailed example: the authors￯﾿ﾽ own JUnit regression testing framework for implementing unit tests in Java. They start simple, using JUnit as existing functionality that will be accessed through Eclipse, and using the extension of JUnit for testing plug-ins, PDE JUnit. Next, they add the elements required for a complete Eclipse contribution. As the authors put it, collectively, ￯﾿ﾽThe contributions add up to a new way to think about tests during the development process, and each bit shows you a useful corner of Eclipse.￯﾿ﾽ

Along the way, you￯﾿ﾽll walk through implementing menu items, displaying results, defining extension points that allow others to extend JUnit, and packaging your plug-in. Gamma and Beck cover a wide range of issues associated with Eclipse development and testing, ranging from auto-test properties and exception handling to tracing, markers and marker resolution, and test reporting using JFace.

Last but not least, the authors present a ￯﾿ﾽdesigner-to-designer￯﾿ﾽ tour of Eclipse built around design and implementation patterns, and showing how these patterns play out in diverse contexts. If you care about design at all, you￯﾿ﾽll find this stuff invaluable. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Contributing to Eclipse offersA 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.

SYNOPSIS