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You're reading from  Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

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Published inAug 2016
Reading LevelExpert
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ISBN-139781783980697
Edition2nd Edition
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Alex Blewitt
Alex Blewitt
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Alex Blewitt

contacted on 30 aug 16 _____________ Dr Alex Blewitt has over 20 years of experience in Objective-C and has been using Apple frameworks since NeXTstep 3.0. He upgraded his NeXTstation for a TiBook when Apple released Mac OS X in 2001 and has been developing on it ever since. Alex currently works for an investment bank in London, writes for the on-line technology news site InfoQ and has published two other books for Packt publishing. He also has a number of apps on the Apple AppStore through Bandlem Limited. When he's not working on technology, and if the weather is nice, he likes to go flying from the nearby Cranfield airport. Alex writes regularly at his blog, http://alblue.bandlem.com, as well tweeting regularly from Twitter as @alblue. Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the ongoing love and support of my wife Amy, who has helped me through both the highs and lows of life. She gave me the freedom to work during the many late nights and weekends that it takes to produce a book and its associated code repository. She truly is the Lem of my life. I'd also like to thank my parents, Ann and Derek, for their encouragement and support during my formative years. It was this work ethic that allowed me to start my technology career as a teenager and to incorporate my first company before I was 25. I'd also like to congratulate them on their 50th wedding anniversary in 2015, and I look forward to reaching that goal with Amy. Thanks are due especially to the reviewer of this version of the book: Antonio Bello, as well as the previous version of this book: Nate Cook, James Robert and Arvid Gerstmann, who provided excellent feedback on the contents of this book during development and caught many errors in both the text and code. Any remaining errors are my own. I'd also like to thank my children Sam and Holly for inspiring me and hope that they too can achieve anything that they set their minds to. Finally, I'd like to thank Ben Moseley and Eren Kotan, both of whom introduced me to NeXT in the first place and set my career going on a twenty year journey to this book.
Read more about Alex Blewitt

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Chapter 1 – Creating Your First Plug-in


Eclipse workspaces and plug-ins

1. An Eclipse workspace is the location where all the projects are stored.

2. The naming convention for Eclipse plug-in projects is to use a reverse domain name prefix, such as com.packtpub. Additionally UI projects typically have a .ui. in their name.

3. The three key files in an Eclipse plug-in are META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, plugin.xml, and build.properties.

Launching Eclipse

1a. Quit the application with File | Exit.

1b. Use the stop button from the Debug or Console views.

2. Launch configurations are similar to pre-canned scripts which can start up an application, set its working directory and environment, and run a class.

3. Launch configurations are modified with the Run | Run Configurations… or Debug | Debug Configurations… menus.

Debugging

1. Use the Debug | Debug configurations or Debug | Debug As… menus.

2. Set step filters via the preferences menu to avoid certain package names.

3. Breakpoints can be: conditional, method entry/exit, enabled/disabled, or number of iterations.

4. Set a breakpoint and set it after a hit count of 256.

5. Use a conditional breakpoint and set argument==null as the condition.

6. Inspecting an object means opening it up in the viewer so that the values of the object can be interrogated and expanded.

7. The expression watches window allows arbitrary expressions to be set.

8. Multiple statements can be set in the breakpoint conditions provided that there is a return statement at the end.

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Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition
Published in: Aug 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781783980697

Author (1)

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Alex Blewitt

contacted on 30 aug 16 _____________ Dr Alex Blewitt has over 20 years of experience in Objective-C and has been using Apple frameworks since NeXTstep 3.0. He upgraded his NeXTstation for a TiBook when Apple released Mac OS X in 2001 and has been developing on it ever since. Alex currently works for an investment bank in London, writes for the on-line technology news site InfoQ and has published two other books for Packt publishing. He also has a number of apps on the Apple AppStore through Bandlem Limited. When he's not working on technology, and if the weather is nice, he likes to go flying from the nearby Cranfield airport. Alex writes regularly at his blog, http://alblue.bandlem.com, as well tweeting regularly from Twitter as @alblue. Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the ongoing love and support of my wife Amy, who has helped me through both the highs and lows of life. She gave me the freedom to work during the many late nights and weekends that it takes to produce a book and its associated code repository. She truly is the Lem of my life. I'd also like to thank my parents, Ann and Derek, for their encouragement and support during my formative years. It was this work ethic that allowed me to start my technology career as a teenager and to incorporate my first company before I was 25. I'd also like to congratulate them on their 50th wedding anniversary in 2015, and I look forward to reaching that goal with Amy. Thanks are due especially to the reviewer of this version of the book: Antonio Bello, as well as the previous version of this book: Nate Cook, James Robert and Arvid Gerstmann, who provided excellent feedback on the contents of this book during development and caught many errors in both the text and code. Any remaining errors are my own. I'd also like to thank my children Sam and Holly for inspiring me and hope that they too can achieve anything that they set their minds to. Finally, I'd like to thank Ben Moseley and Eren Kotan, both of whom introduced me to NeXT in the first place and set my career going on a twenty year journey to this book.
Read more about Alex Blewitt