What s Inside | Eclipse

What's Inside

From cover to cover, this book is pure Eclipse, covering hundreds of skills and techniques. We start from the most basic Java development and work up to creating your own plug-in editors for the Eclipse environment. Here are a few of the topics in this book:

Using Eclipse to develop Java code
Working with JAR files
Setting launch configurations
Selecting Java runtimes
Creating Javadoc
Refactoring
Extracting Interfaces
Viewing type hierarchies
Customizing Eclipse
Testing code with JUnit
Debugging
Setting breakpoint hit counts
Using hot code replacement
Sharing projects with CVS
Comparing code with local history
Using Ant to build Eclipse projects
GUI programming from applets to Swing
Using the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)
SWT buttons , text, labels, lists, layouts, and events
SWT menus , toolbars , sliders, trees, and dialogs
Developing web applications
Writing servlet code in place
Using the Sysdeo Tomcat plug-in
Debugging and deploying web projects
Developing Struts applications with Eclipse
Using the Easy Struts plug-in
Developing Eclipse plug-ins
The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE)
Plug-in manifests
Extension points
Using the Run-time Workbench
Creating a standard plug-in
Creating an action set
Creating plug-in menus
Creating a multipage editor plug-in
Creating a plug-in wizard
Creating an Eclipse view supported with a plug-in

We're going to see all these topics and many more in the upcoming pages. Here's an overview of each chapter:

Chapter 1: This chapter is all about the basics, including all the details on the Eclipse Workbench and an introduction to the Java Development Tools (JDT).
Chapter 2: Using the JDT, we're going to create Java projects, create code automatically, implement syntax checking, and start developing significant Java applications.
Chapter 3: An IDE wouldn't be much use without a debugger. Eclipse and the JDT give you all the power of a true debugger, including breakpoints, expression evaluators , being able to change values on the fly, and more.
Chapter 4: One of the valuable aspects of Eclipse is that it lets you develop in teams, something that any commercial developer can appreciate, since significant development is usually done in teams . Using Concurrent Versions System (CVS), team members do all of their work in their own workbenches, but they can share and register their work using a CVS repository.
Chapter 5: Ant is a powerful Java build tool, and we'll see in this chapter that you can do things with Ant in Eclipse that Eclipse can't do alone, such as copy and move files.
Chapter 6: This chapter starts our work using Eclipse to handle GUI development with Swing. We'll also take a look at a Swing plug-in for Eclipse hereusing this plug-in, for example, you can drag and drop Swing controls.
Chapter 7: In this chapter and the next , we'll be covering the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT)the GUI toolkit for Java developers that provides a portable API and tight integration with the underlying native GUI platform. SWTa 100% Java alternative to the AWT and Swingis another reason Eclipse has become so popular, and we're going to spend two chapters on it.
Chapter 8: This chapter completes our coverage of the SWT, including dialogs, toolbars, sliders, trees, menus, and more.
Chapter 9: This chapter gets us started with web development, creating both servlets and JSP using Eclipse and the Tomcat server. We'll also take a look at a Tomcat Eclipse plug-in.
Chapter 10: We continue our web work in this chapter with applications constructed using the Struts framework. We'll also see how to use a Struts plug-in.
Chapter 11: In this chapter, we're going to start creating Eclipse plug-ins to extend Eclipse. We'll use the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) and other tools in this chapter to create working plug-ins.
Chapter 12: Here, we're going to get the details on some more advanced aspects of plug-in creationeditors, creating wizards, and how to support Eclipse views.
Chapter 13: In this chapter, we're going to take a look at Eclipse Version 3.0. This will give you a glimpse at the exciting things on the Eclipse horizon.