Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) for software. It also represents an ideal, incorporating modularity, extensibility, and community. Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins is therefore significantly more than a book about how to write plug-ins for the Eclipse framework. The book--by software patterns guru Erich Gamma and "extreme programming" exponent Kent Beck--explains how new Eclipse modules should interact with existing software elements, and make themselves further extensible. It also emphasizes the importance of packaging new plug-ins and making them available to others as new Eclipse features. The book's emphasis is on community, and helping the Eclipse project grow and improve.

That said, this book is an excellent how-to guide. Gamma and Beck take the time to carefully detail a couple of model plug-in projects--including the industry-standard Hello World exercise--and take care to explain the highly visual Eclipse development process one step at a time. They don't unleash bushels of source code on the reader, but nonetheless manage to walk the reader through a series of progressively more elaborate extension projects that exercise some of the most exciting parts of the Eclipse framework. As you'd expect from a book involving Gamma, discussion of patterns appears with increasing frequency toward the book's conclusion, enabling the reader to expand on the authors' shared wisdom and understand the Eclipse design better. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to extend the Eclipse development environment--both in the narrow sense of writing code that makes the software do something new, and in the broad sense of participating in the Eclipse community. Specific coverage addresses extension points, markers, perspectives, and help. There's also a guide to the Eclipse architecture, framed as a series of "pattern stories."

Product Description

This book encourages tool building by laying bare the design of an excellent tool platform, Eclipse, and encourages design by building a typical tool extending Eclipse. This tutorial on creating custom tools also provides an explanation of a highly effective software design philosophy. The authors revive the lost art of supporting existing work by building tools. This book improves the software developers skill set by building little tools, and gradually growing those tools into better-than-professional quality products to help a whole community of developers. This book revives that highly-effective practice of tool writing and provides lessons along the way that tool building and design are two of the most leveraged skills for software developers.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (October 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321205758
• ISBN-13: 978-0321205759
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #201,860 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

• This item is part of The Eclipse Series.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What I would expect if there was NO docs for eclipse, November 5, 2004

By	Manuel A. Ricart "aricart" (Cottage Grove, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't like this book as a book on writing plugins for eclipse for the following reasons:

1) This book's 'exploratory' approach tries to show you how to search (the hack approach) through the installed plugins for excerpts that you can copy/paste/edit. It would have been more useful if the authors used a 'tutorial' approach that constrains the example to documented basics (many different examples that then integrate/or not).

2) As expected (and tiring if you have other book from these authors), JUnit integration is the example developed throughout the book. This may satisfy the need for some types of plugins (code oriented plugins), but leaves much to be desired if you want to develop other kinds of tools.

3) The samples are outdated in 3.0, and the main example won't work/run in 3.0 (even if you download their project source). If you try to follow along, you will quickly be disapointed once you run into that snag. I am sure that under 2.x it works great.

4) This book is useful as a way of seeing a small example built up. However, because of #3, this all becomes useless once the plugin doesn't 'work'.

As with most books that cook a long example as a way of teaching, rather than as a way to support other knowledge, much of the time is spent on explaining how to cook things for the example. For me this doesn't work, as I want something focused that instructs me, rather than a evolving code-walkthrough of a particular example. To me this is boring, and has no use after the initial read.

This book would be great if it was 1/2 as long, and focused on the patterns for the plugins instead, not presume to be an intro to plugin development.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Different is good, September 3, 2004

By	Ernest Friedman-Hill "JavaRanch Sheriff" (Gaithersburg, MD United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Contributing to Eclipse" is a great read. More importantly, as someone who is in the middle of their first major Eclipse plugin development project, I learned a lot -- even though I've previously read every other available book on the topic. Gamma and Beck take you through the development of a fairly sophisticated plugin, step by step. Perhaps most welcome, the plugin they develop isn't a syntax-highlighting text editor (an example that's already been done to death,) but a set of tools for running JUnit tests on Java code!

This is the only book I've seen that discusses testing and Test-Driven Development of plugins, a must for serious plugin developers. As you'd expect from the developers of JUnit, they use JUnit to test every piece of functionality they add. Surprisingly, even though you'd expect some confusing in writing about using JUnit to test a JUnit plugin, there's none. Gamma and Beck are both excellent writers, and they know this subject matter inside out.

A word of warning: this is neither an introduction to nor a reference for Eclipse plugin programming. I don't think I would have gotten nearly as much from this book if I hadn't read "Eclipse in Action" and "The Java Programmer's Guide to Eclipse" first. But if you've gotten beyond the novice level with Eclipse, I guarantee you'll learn something by reading this book.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great resource for anyone that wants to extend Eclipse, November 10, 2003

By	"ntpruett" (Eagan, MN United States) - See all my reviews

Eclipse is the name of both an open source IDE and the extensible framework that it is built upon. A little experience of using Eclipse as an IDE, and a desire to extend the framework further are needed for this book. Before you know it, you'll be developing your first plug-in. Of course, it's a 'Hello World', but it introduces the concepts you need to go on to bigger and better things. The 'bigger and better' thing the book provides is a JUnit plug-in that performs automatic unit tests during builds. The authors don't just teach you how to build a plug-in, but how to build a plug-in that 'plays well with others' and allows for your plug-in to be extended in the future. Wrapping up the book are a collection of 'pattern stories' describing some of the design patterns used in Eclipse. The clear writing style and the flow of topics will help you get up to speed and writing plug-ins in no time. If you need further details on a topic ample references to the Eclipse documentation or other books that will help you on the subject are provided. All-in-all this book is a great resource for anyone that wants to extend the functionality of Eclipse.