The sound of a head banging against the wall
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
I attended the EclipseCon conference a couple of weeks ago and was impressed by the amount of developer and vendor support for Eclipse. Having plenty of experience with creating and modifying Emacs modes, I decided to experiment with creating an Eclipse plug-in today to see what developing for the "next generation universal tool platform" was like. I followed the excellent set of instructions that are on the web version of the soon-to-be-released Eclipse: Building Commercial Quality Plug-ins book. Here's a summary of the steps that I went through to create a simple plug-in that prints "one two three" in a window in Eclipse:
- Select a menu option to run a wizard to create a new plug-in
- Step through 7 dialog pages of parameters to create the plug-in
- Create an Ant XML make file (manually - about 53 LOC) to package the plug-in for distribution
- 1 project directory
- 6 object code directories
- 1 icons directory
- 4 Java class files
- 2 Java source files
- 3 project-specific "dot" files
- 2 build files (1 XML and 1 properties file)
- 6 temporary distribution build directories
- 4 distribution build-related files
- 1 eclipse plugin file
