Either books (free or not), online tutorials, articles, etc.
+3
A:
The wiki: Eclipse Plug-in Development FAQ is a good start.
But you need to look at Osgi which manages the lifecycle of the plugins you will develop.
For that, the free book "Osgi in practice" is excellent.
VonC
2009-08-31 10:45:40
Funny. This is the first time I see that the official site of something points to wikipedia instead of providing itself the explanations.
flybywire
2009-08-31 12:45:08
@x-x: True, but Osgi in itself is not "made" by Eclipse, so to avoid another collection of pointers on that external topic... they refer to Wikipedia.
VonC
2009-08-31 12:47:30
A:
You can find many useful examples and snippets in the eclipse cvs:
http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/
regards Karl
Zappi
2009-08-31 13:55:14
A:
I think, this is the best book about the eclipse plug-in development.
penguru
2009-09-02 13:15:31
A:
SWT: The Standard Widget Toolkit is a really good book.
I wish I've had read that book when I started out writing Eclipse plug-ins, it would have saved me a lot of time. The book gives you a deep understanding of SWT, which I believe is necessary if you're going to write anything professionally. The book explains all those little details you otherwise will have to spend hours searching the net for; how do layout managers really work, what is the event loop?
When it comes to integrating with the Eclipse workbench; using extensions points, editors, views, menus, commands/handlers/viewers, etc. I think you can pick it up by playing around with some of the plug-in development wizards that comes with Eclipse. The books I've read so far, about JFace and plug-in development in general, haven't really been helpful.
Also, don't forget to look at the Eclipse source code. It will give you a lot of ideas how to do things. Good luck!
Kire Haglin
2009-09-03 19:35:37