This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

Producing a commercial-quality plug-in means going above and beyond the minimal requirements needed to integrate with Eclipse. It means attending to all those details that contribute to the “fit and polish” of a commercial offering. This comprehensive guide covers the entire process of plug-in development, including all the extra steps needed to achieve the highest quality results.

Building on two internationally best-selling previous editions, Eclipse Plug-ins, Third Edition, has been fully revised to reflect the powerful new capabilities of Eclipse 3.4. Leading Eclipse experts Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel present detailed, practical coverage of every aspect of plug-in development, as well as specific, proven solutions for the challenges developers are most likely to encounter.

All code examples, relevant API listings, diagrams, and screen captures have been thoroughly updated to reflect both the Eclipse 3.4 API and the latest Java syntax. In addition, Clayberg and Rubel have completely revamped their popular Favorites View case study, reworking much of its content and recreating its code from scratch. The authors carefully cover new functionality added to existing Eclipse features, such as views and editors, and fully explain brand-new features such as Commands, GEF, and PDE Build.

This extensively revised edition

• Thoroughly covers Eclipse’s new preferences

• Illuminates the powerful new Eclipse Command Framework, which replaces Eclipse’s older Action Framework

• Presents extensive new discussions of using commands with views and editors

• Introduces Mylyn, the new task-focused interface that reduces information overload and simplifies multi-tasking

• Contains an all-new chapter on using the Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) to build dynamic, interactive graphical user interface elements

• Walks you step by step through the entire PDE Build process

• Shows how to create update sites with p2, which replaces Eclipse’s old Update Manager

This book is designed for every experienced developer interested in extending the Eclipse platform, the Rational Software Development Platform, or any other platform that supports Eclipse plug-ins.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 38 Ratings

Too many trees, too little forest - 2008-06-16
Reviewer Rating:
I am writing Eclipse plug-ins for almost two years now and owned this book almost from the beginning. Looking back I must say that the book helped me get started and let me believe "it's possible". As probably many others I was a little intimidated at first by the vast possibilities of the framework.
Now that I am much more experienced I must say that whenever I look into the book it leaves me a little bit disappointed. It only adds little value to the "Platform Plug-in Developer Guide" which is part of the online documentation and already covers a lot.
The book goes into details and code very quickly without explaining the concepts very well. I still use the book every now and then for finding some nuggets not covered elsewhere and sometimes I get lucky but not too often.
Shall you buy this book? If you are a beginner and if you like to learn by programming a sample plug-in then yes. The more proficient you get the more the book will lose its value and you will use other sources of information.

Fantastic book(and a few suggestions) - 2008-04-22
Reviewer Rating:
If you're planning to write an eclipse plugin, this is THE book to read. The authors have done a fantastic job. Kudos.
Now a few suggestions.
The examples in the book can now be imported in the form of an eclipse plugin. This is great but the examples take a huge leap. For example, chapter 6 introduces you to the concept of views and shows you how to build a simple view with a table and a hard coded set of values. The example in chapter 7 is a huge leap in complexity. It would have been nice to have an example that shows you how to wire events to mouse clicks in the basic "One, Two, Three" view. Instead, the example in chapter 7 tries to do too much. As such, I can only give a limited time to reading the book and going through the examples. The jump in the complexity of the examples from chapter 6 to chapter 7 is like going from "hello world" to socket programming.

Again, my review is based on the perspective of someone who is writing eclipse plugins as productivity tools for my project, not as commercial products that I plan to sell. I may not be the right audience for your fantastic book but I suspect there are a lot of people like me who want to write plugins as productivity tools. Since your book is THE best book on eclipse plugins, I'm sure they'll be referring to it too.

Another thing: Part of the examples from chapter 7 don't seem to work. Specifically, the "add to favorites" button on the toolbar doesn't work because the selection object is of the type TextSelection and not IStructuredSelection. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Update: After having actually written a decent eclipse plugin, I have a list of suggestions for people who're just getting started.
1. Eclipse Corner is a very good resource for tips on writing eclipse plugins.
2. If you can't figure out how something is done, try looking for code on google codesearch. For example, lang:java eclipse ASTRewrite
3. If you're using Ganymede, you can see how things are done in the eclipse source code. For example, if you want to see the code that implements the outline view, select the outline view and hit Alt-Shift-F1. This will bring up the plugin spy. It will have a link to the source code that implements the outline view. Of course, the real code for the outline view is buried in a deep hierarchy but you get the general idea.

Eclipse Plug-ins - 2009-11-12
Reviewer Rating:
Despite its huge size, this book isn't able to cover all of the Eclipse API in detail. For example, there isn't proper coverage of form editors and undo support.

There is an entire chapter devoted to GEF, but, like RCP, that seems like it needs to be a book of it's own in order to be useful. Btw I hope the RCP book in this series gets updated soon!

No complaints about the quality of the writing. Unlike many technical books this size, the writing doesn't degrade into lists and tables copied from the API documentation.

Didn't find any mistakes, but the book is bound to get outdated fast: The 3rd edition was written for Eclipse 3.4; the current version is now 3.5, and milestone builds are available for 3.6...

Any programmer seeking an advanced Eclipse 'bible' of detail must have this - 2008-11-15
Reviewer Rating:
Eclipse has become a dominant force in applications and its success rests largely on its generous plug-in applications which extend its abilities to developers. That's why the second updated edition Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-Ins is key to any advanced programming collection specializing in Java or Eclipse: it's been revised to incorporate Eclipse 3.1 and 3.2 APIs, and offers both a quick introduction and a step-by-step reference for experienced Eclipse users to take the next advanced steps. Any programmer seeking an advanced Eclipse 'bible' of detail must have this.

Very helpful - 2008-02-09
Reviewer Rating:
This is a good guide for developing Eclipse plugins. Since most online documentation for Eclipse is garbage, this will get you up and running in much less time. It doesn't answer all questions but is a handy reference.

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