Plug-in Development Environment Overview
The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) provides tools to create,
develop, test, debug, build and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments,
features, update sites and RCP products.
PDE also provides comprehensive OSGi tooling, which makes it an ideal
environment for component programming, not just Eclipse plug-in
development.
PDE is broken into three main components:
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UI - A rich set of models, tools and editors to develop plug-ins and OSGi bundles
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API Tooling - Tooling to assist API documentation and maintenence
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Build - Ant based tools and scripts to automate build processes
Discover the latest features in the
What's New section.
PDE UI
PDE UI provides a editors, wizards, launchers, views and other tools to create a full featured environment to develop and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments,
features, update sites, RCP products and OSGi bundles.
Some of the PDE tools include:
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Form-Based Manifest Editors: Multi-page editors that centrally manage all manifest files of a plug-in or feature.
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RCP Tools: Wizards and a form-based editor that allow you to define, brand, test and export products to multiple platforms.
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New Project Creation Wizards: Create a new plug-in, fragment, feature, feature patch and update sites.
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Import Wizards: Import plug-ins and features from the file system.
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Export Wizards: Wizards that build, package and export plug-ins, fragments and products with a single click.
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Launchers: Test and debug Eclipse applications and OSGi bundles.
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Views: PDE provides views that help plug-in developers inspect different aspects of their development environment.
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Miscellaneous Tools: Wizards to externalize and clean up manifest files.
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Conversion Tools: Wizard to convert a plain Java project or plain JARs into a plug-in project.
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Integration with JDT: Plug-in manifest files participate in Java search and refactoring.
To get started, try out the following cheat sheets:
Creating an Eclipse Plug-in
Creating a Rich Client Application
PDE API Tooling
PDE API Tooling assists in the documentation and maintenance of APIs provided by plug-ins and OSGi bundles.
Some of the features include:
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Compatibility Analysis : Identify binary compatibility issues relative to a previous version of a plug-in.
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API Restriction Tags : Javadoc tags are provided to explicitly define restrictions associated with types and members.
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Version Number Validation : Identify invalid plug-in version numbers relative to a previous version of a plug-in.
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Javadoc
@since Tag Validation : Identify missing and invalid @since tags on types and members.
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API Leak Analysis : Identify API types and methods that leak non-API types.
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Quick Fixes : Quick fixes are provided to adjust plug-in versions and @since tags appropriately.
To get started, see the tasks:
PDE Build
PDE Build facilitates the automation of plug-in build processes. PDE Build produces Ant scripts based on development-time information provided by, for example, the plugin.xml and build.properties files. The generated Ant scripts, can fetch the relevant projects from a CVS repository, build jars, Javadoc, source zips, put everything together in a format ready to ship and send it out to a remote location (e.g., a local network or a downloads server).
To get started, see the following:
