[pdt-dev] State of eclipse plugin development, any thoughts?

[Eenhuis <exceptione@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I try to develop some additional functionality for eclipse pdt, as you can see in my previous thread [1].

I have spent quite some time figuring out where to find the SSE autoedit extension point. Fact is, it doesn exist as such, but digging around the internet revealed there is a provisionalConfiguration  with type autoeditstrategy in org.eclipse.wst.sse.ui.editorConfiguration.


What bothers me is that I cannot find any docmentation about the extensibe parts of org.eclipse.wst.sse. As I understood from my experimenations [1], the documentation about pdt is incorrect and outdated. It took me a lot of time figuring out the dependencies for the sample pdt extension implementation, as the (granted, outdated) documentation does not mention them.


I am not experienced in eclipse plugin development, so I am inclined to attribute my impression ("this is one giant ball of undocumented dependency mudd") to my ignorance. How did you manage to  master this complexity? I feel both stupid and frustrated.


An other observation I had is that I can´t see clear boundaries. I see types from wtp, dltk, jface.text etc mixed all over the place (not just in pdt, also in wtp itself for example). Now, if I want to contribute functionality to pdt I have to understand its dependencies too.




LINKS:

1. http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/pdt-dev/msg03129.html