Sunday, April 1, 2012

Writing Eclipse Plugins Tutorial - Part 1

Eclipse is one of three most popular java development IDEs. One reason for its success is its extensibility. Writing eclipse plugins can be very fast and easy for anyone who knows what to do and already done it.

Unfortunately, doing something in Eclipse for the first time can be very time consuming and frustrating. Eclipse framework is huge, powerful and sometimes complicated. It may be difficult to figure out which features are available and how to use them.

This tutorial explains basics of all eclipse features needed to automate a simple java refactoring task. It shows how to add new items into the menu and how to analyze, modify and format java source code. It also shows how to use dialogs to communicate with users.