Home » Eclipse Projects » Eclipse Platform » Newer plugin tutorials for latest Eclipse version?
| Newer plugin tutorials for latest Eclipse version? [message #649865] |
Thu, 20 January 2011 19:02  |
 d.m.jackson
Messages: 10
Registered: January 2010 |
Junior Member |
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Greetings,
A little history: I've been hunting around for a pluggable component based rcp framework to do a little personal java project, both as an educational experience and to hopefully have a useful application or two in the aftermath. I looked at a few plugin frameworks and I've messed with Netbeans and it's module system and then I found Eclipse.
I dug around online and found some tutorials on building Eclipse RCP applications and determined that I really liked the simplicity and elegance of Eclipse's plugin framework....until I dug a little deeper and found out that you guys have ripped the guts out of your own internal implementation in favor of OSGi. Good Lord, can no one leave anything alone? It was simple, it was straight forward, IT WORKED.
Now to build Eclipse apps on a proper pluggable framework we are incouraged to pile another 10 megabytes of junk in our apps in order to get plugin identification, descriptors and have a central registry and the like....I guess, or implement it ourselves? I don't know, I guess I'm just frustrated to find that after working through some tutorials [ones that actually made sense and went into detail] that the method calls they depended on are now depreciated and you have OSGified a simple elegant solution.
Does anyone know of some more recent tutorials that are as detailed and clear as this one: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Plug-in-architecture /plugin_architecture.html using the "new improved" formula? Even better, are there any detailed tutorials out there that illustrate using the plugin capabilities that missed getting cut out of the Eclipse runtime package without resorting to OSGi bundles? Or is bundles where we're all headed now days and I'm just going to have to suck it up and get used to it? Sheesh...even the word bundles brings to mind an image of a hobo sleeping under and overpass.
Sorry about this rant, I guess I'm always one step behind. 
Mark
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| Re: Newer plugin tutorials for latest Eclipse version? [message #650044 is a reply to message #649865] |
Fri, 21 January 2011 14:25  |
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On 01/20/2011 02:02 PM, Mark wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I dug around online and found some tutorials on building Eclipse RCP
> applications and determined that I really liked the simplicity and
> elegance of Eclipse's plugin framework....until I dug a little deeper
> and found out that you guys have ripped the guts out of your own
> internal implementation in favor of OSGi. Good Lord, can no one leave
> anything alone? It was simple, it was straight forward, IT WORKED.
Well, actually, it didn't work ... or more specifically, it worked to
the limit of what it could do, but couldn't meet the changing
requirements of the system (scalability, flexibility, modularity, etc).
OSGi is a spec, is powerful, is flexible ... but yes with flexibility
comes complexity.
But the OSGi framework is 1.3M. That plus your own bundle plus a
config.ini is all you need to load that bundle into OSGi. OSGi doesn't
have to be that complex, unless you have a large system. It simply
enforces modularity ... and modularity is *hard* :-)
>
> Now to build Eclipse apps on a proper pluggable framework we are
> incouraged to pile another 10 megabytes of junk in our apps in order to
To create a basic RCP app, like the RCP mail app, you're consuming SWT
(2.5M), JFace (1M), the Workbench (4M), ICU4J (6M, although it can be
replaced with something about 70K) on top of the OSGi framework.
This is the working system, and has nothing to do with OSGi replacing
the core.runtime stuff for plugin management. i.e. even the old way,
you'd still have this stuff part of RCP.
>
> Does anyone know of some more recent tutorials that are as detailed and
> clear as this one:
> http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Plug-in-architecture /plugin_architecture.html
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Whitepaper-Platform-3.1/ecli pse-platform-whitepaper.pdf
Just working with RCP apps: RCP Tutorial
http://www.eclipse.org/resources/resource.php?id=182
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/article.php?file=Article-act ion-contribution/index.html
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-WorkbenchSelections/ article.html
Lars Vogel also has a number of tutorials on his site.
>
> Sorry about this rant, I guess I'm always one step behind. :blush:
My suggestions is to, as you say, "suck it up" :-)
The change-over was made in 3.0, release June 2004. The OSGi part and
extension registry part are solid, but unless you need to include lots
of 3rd party jars that do their own classloading I've never found it
interferes much.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
Later,
PW
P.S. there are simply plugin frameworks available as well. JPF - java
plugin framework. It aims to simplify plugin based systems and can be
found at http://jpf.sourceforge.net/
--
Paul Webster
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_Command_Framework
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Command_Core_Expressions
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_Expression_Framework
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Menu_Contributions
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Menus_Extension_Mapping
http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse .platform.doc.isv/guide/workbench.htm
Paul Webster
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Platform_Command_Framework
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Command_Core_Expressions
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Menu_Contributions
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