Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to

Over 10 practical recipes for creating rich client applications using Eclipse 4 with this book and ebook

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results
• Produce rich client standalone applications using Eclipse 4
• Create an application user interface using an application model
• Customize and package your applications for multiple target platforms

In Detail

Standalone desktop applications are important in this era of web and mobile applications. Eclipse provides a rich set of APIs and tools, not just to create IDEs but also to create cross-platform standalone applications. Eclipse 4 has introduced many new concepts and APIs that make creating rich client application a lot easier.

Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to is a practical and hands-on guide to developing standalone applications. It also describes concepts and APIs used to perform specific tasks. The tasks identified in this book are most commonly performed in developing standalone applications of various levels of complexity.

Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to takes the approach of learning new features of Eclipse 4 by breaking them into specific tasks and progressively building a sample application using new features.

The book covers end-to-end workflow from setting up the development environment, creating the user interface, event handling, and displaying and saving data, to customizing and packaging the application. It provides code snippets for each task and explains the Eclipse 4 APIs and concepts used in them.The code will be easy to follow, making up part of the process of creating the entire sample application.

What you will learn from this book

• Add custom menus, toolbar items, and keyboard shortcuts using an application model
• Create static and dynamic views
• Generate a dynamic pop-up menu
• Use core expressions to show/hide menu items
• Use Dependency Injection and annotations to access Eclipse 4 framework objects and services
• Create custom events and handlers for notifications and to share data in the application
• Style applications using CSS
• Customize and export the application to different target platforms

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks.A concise guide that delivers immediate results with practical recipes on learning practical hints and avoiding pitfalls in Eclipse 4 development.

Who this book is written for

You will find this book useful if you are looking to create cross-platform rich client applications. Eclipse platform is built with Java, so basic knowledge of Java is essential. The focus of this book is to understand the new APIs and concepts of the Eclipse 4 platform. Prior knowledge of basic concepts of the Eclipse framework (plugin, extension, perspective, workspace, and so on), SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), and JFace would be beneficial in understanding the examples in this book quicker.