Plug-in Development 101: The Fundamentals

Organizing Manifests

The next step on our journey is to organize our manifest files (i.e., MANIFEST.MF and plugin.xml) with some best practices. PDE provides a convenient wizard that can be invoked via the Overview page's Exporting section. Once the wizard is launched (see Figure 14), you're presented with a variety of options that can be tweaked. The defaults are very reasonable, but there are certain options like making sure there are no stray keys in the plugin.properties file, which is very useful.

Figure 14: The Organize Manifests wizard

Conclusion 

On the whole, this article's mission was to give an introduction to the basics of plug-in development with some best practices sprinkled in. We accomplished that by creating a sample plug-in and going through a typical plug-in development workflow. Once the workflow is learned, it becomes much easier to develop plug-ins and even easier to maintain them with best practices like the Organize Manifests wizard. Part 2 will focus on using the tooling available for developing rich-client applications and finishing the rest of the plug-in development workflow presented in Figure 1.

Resources

Learn

• Learn more about OSGi Alliance.
  
  
• Learn more about Eclipse Plug-in Versioning at the Eclipse Foundation wiki.
  
  
• See the Eclipse EE guide at the Eclipse Foundation wiki.
  
  
• Learn more about the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
  
  
• To learn more about the Eclipse SDK, see the Eclipse Foundation documentation titled "Platform Extension Points."
  
  
• Need help debugging in Eclipse? Read "Debugging with the Eclipse Platform."
  
  
• Good background information on internationalizing plug-ins can be found in the Eclipse Foundation's articles "How to Internationalize your Eclipse Plug-In" and "How to Test Your Internationalized Eclipse Plug-In ."
  
  
• Check out the "Recommended Eclipse reading list."
  
  
• Browse all the Eclipse content on developerWorks.
  
  
• New to Eclipse? Read the developerWorks article "Get started with Eclipse Platform" to learn its origin and architecture, and how to extend Eclipse with plug-ins.
  
  
• Expand your Eclipse skills by checking out IBM developerWorks' Eclipse project resources.
  
  
  Get products and technologies
  
• Download an Eclipse distribution containing the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) from the Eclipse Foundation.
  
  
• The first stop to make when seeking plug-ins is the Eclipse Foundation's project list.
  
  
• The second stop to make when seeking plug-ins is Eclipse Plug-in Central (EPIC).
  
  
• Check out the latest Eclipse technology downloads at IBM alphaWorks.
  
  
• Download Eclipse Platform and other projects from the Eclipse Foundation.
  
  Discuss
  
• The Eclipse Platform newsgroups should be your first stop to discuss questions regarding Eclipse. (Selecting this will launch your default Usenet news reader application and open eclipse.platform.)
  
  
• The Eclipse newsgroups has many resources for people interested in using and extending Eclipse.
  
  
• Participate in developerWorks blogs and get involved in the developerWorks community.
  
  

About the author

		Chris Aniszczyk is an Eclipse committer at IBM Lotus who works on OSGi-related development. His primary focus these days is improving Eclipse's Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) and spreading the Eclipse love inside of IBM's Lotus organization. He is an open source enthusiast at heart, specializing in open source evangelism. He evangelizes about Eclipse in his blog, and he's honored to represent the Eclipse committers on the Eclipse Foundation's board of directors. He's always available to discuss open source and Eclipse over a frosty beverage.