Introduction to Eclipse, Creating Eclipse plug-ins

and the Overture editor

David Holst Møller

Engineering College of Aarhus
 Agenda
● Part I – Introduction to Eclipse and Eclipse
Plug-ins
● Part II – The Overture IDE
 A bit of history
● Industry leaders formed the initial eclipse.org Board of
Stewards in November 2001 (Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems,
Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and Webgain)

● Originally an IBM project developed by OTI, the aim

was to develop a platform which could be used for
integrating all their tools in a common software base.
● In January 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was created.
● Annual release since 2006
 Introduction to Eclipse
● An Integrated Development Environment(IDE)
● A Rich Client Platform
● Platform independent
 Terms
● Workbench
● Resources
– Projects
– Folders
– Files
● Perspectives
– Views
– Editors
 The Eclipse Java IDE
● Java development tooling (JDT)
● Competing with Netbeans (Sun) and
Jdeveloper (Oracle)
 Features in Java environment
● Outline
● Code Completion
● Team development (CVS - integrated)
● Refactoring
● Debugging
● Error
● Syntax
● Etc.

8
 Eclipse Plug-in Architecture
● Designed for plug-ins
● Far superior range of plug-ins.
 Plug-in Terms 1
● A plug-in in Eclipse is a component that
provides a certain type of service within the
context of the Eclipse workbench.
● A feature is a way of grouping and describing
different functionality that makes up a product.
Grouping plug-ins into features allows the
product to be installed and updated using the
Eclipse update server and related support.

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 Plug-in Terms 2
● Extensions are the central mechanism for
contributing behaviour to the platform.
● Extension points define new function points
for the platform that other plug-ins can plug into.
● Except for a small kernel known as the
Platform Runtime, all of the Eclipse Platform's
functionality is located in plug-ins.

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Extension loading

13
Example: Preference page
● Plug-ins may contribute
preference pages
● All preference pages are
assembled and categorized in
the Preferences dialog
● How is the Preferences dialog
created?
● How and when is a particular
preference page created?

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Create the Preferences Dialog - 1/3

● The UI plug-in provides the

org.eclipse.ui.preference Pages
extension point
● The UI plug-in first creates an
empty Preferences dialog
● Now the dialog needs to be
populated...

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Generate the Preference Page Index (2/3)

● The UI plug-in queries the

extension registry for all
org.eclipse.ui.preferencePages
extensions
● The preference page index is
then generated using the xml
markup only:
● Names for available
preference pages are
displayed in the tree using
the name attribute
● The category attribute is
used to categorize the
pages
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Create the Plug-in Development Preference Page (3/3)

● When the Plug-in Development

preference page gets selected,
the UI plug-in asks the
extension registry to load and
instantiate the Java class
specified by the class attribute
of the corresponding extension
● The class gets loaded and the
preference page gets created
The plug-in providing that
extension (i.e. the
org.eclipse.pde.ui plug- in) may
then get activated, if it’s not
already active

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Defining Plug-ins
 plugin.xml

plugin.properties

MAINFEST.MF
package org.overturetool.ui;

//IMPORTS...
public class OverturePerspective implements IPerspectiveFactory {

public void createInitialLayout(IPageLayout layout) {

....

// views – standard workbench

layout.addShowViewShortcut(IPageLayout.ID_OUTLINE);
layout.addShowViewShortcut(IPageLayout.ID_PROBLEM_VIEW);
layout.addShowViewShortcut(IConsoleConstants.ID_CONSOLE_VIEW);
layout.addShowViewShortcut(navigator);
layout.addShowViewShortcut(IPageLayout.ID_TASK_LIST);
layout.addShowViewShortcut(IProgressConstants.PROGRESS_VIEW_ID);

// new actions
layout.addNewWizardShortcut(
"org.overturetool.internal.ui.wizards.OvertureProjectWizard");
layout.addNewWizardShortcut(
"org.overturetool.internal.ui.wizards.OvertureFileCreationWizard");
layout.addNewWizardShortcut(
"org.eclipse.ui.wizards.new.folder");
layout.addNewWizardShortcut(
"org.eclipse.ui.wizards.new.file");
layout.addNewWizardShortcut(
"org.eclipse.ui.editors.wizards.UntitledTextFileWizard");
}
}
The Overture IDE
 VDM development today
● No integration of interpreter and editor
● Cumbersome development process
● Poor navigation
● No intellisense
● No support for refactoring
● Debugging support is good, but it could be
better
● Test coverage measurement – but rather
bothersome
● Support for Code Generation
● Support for UML→VDM→UML
 Vision for the Overture IDE
● Integrated Development Environment
● The IDE should offer features know from other IDEs. Such as:
● Syntax highlighting
● Easy navigation
– Files, definitions, errors, warnings
● Refactoring
● Advanced debugging features
● Test coverage measurement
● Code generation and UML to and from VDM
● High Extensibility
● The only tool needed for all VDM development - including all dialects
Introduction to the Overture Editor
Vision for the Overture IDE revisited
● Integrated Development Environment
● The IDE should offer features know from other IDEs. Such as:
● Syntax highlighting
● Easy navigation
– Files, definitions , errors, warnings
● Refactoring
● Advanced debugging features
● Test coverage measurement
● Code generation and UML to and from VDM
● High Extensibility
● The only tool needed for all VDM development - including all dialects
Overture IDE Implementation
DLTK
 Debug Protocol
● A common debugger protocol for languages
and debugger UI communication
● Part of the DLTK
Extras...
 OSGi

object-oriented (instead of procedural) Modular (as opposed to unmodular)