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.
In PDE we do tooling, but our business is people!
PDE ships with the Eclipse SDK and can be downloaded from the Eclipse project downloads page.
Find support and interact with users and developers.
The development of PDE is driven by the community in a transparent manner. Read our contributor guide wiki page and get involved.
Visit the wiki page for release planning, test plans, user guides and more.
PDE Components
The PDE subproject is broken down into three main components, Build, UI and API Tools. We also have an Incubator component where we can develop non-SDK features.
Description
Ant based tools and scripts to automate build processes
Models, builders, editors and more to faciliate plug-in development in the Eclipse IDE.
Eclipse IDE and build process integrated tooling to maintain API
Development of new tools that are not ready to be added to the Eclipse SDK
The PDE UI component provides a comprehensive set of tools to create, develop, test, debug and deploy Eclipse
plug-ins, fragments, features, update sites and RCP products.
PDE UI also provides comprehensive OSGi tooling, which makes it an ideal environment
for component programming, not just Eclipse plug-in development.
Here is a small list of what PDE UI provides to the Eclipse SDK:
Form-Based Manifest Editors - multi-page editors that centrally manage all manifest files of a plug-in or feature.
RCP Tools - wizards and a form-based editor that allow you to define, brand, test and export products to multiple platforms.
New Project Creation Wizards - create a new plug-in, fragment, feature, feature patch and update sites.
Import Wizards - import plug-ins and features from the file system.
Export Wizards
- wizards that build, package and export plug-ins, fragments and products with a single click.
Launchers - test and debug Eclipse applications and OSGi bundles.
Views - PDE provides views that help plug-in developers inspect different aspects
of their development environment.
Miscellaneous Tools - wizards to externalize and clean up manifest files.
Conversion Tools - wizard to convert a plain Java project or plain JARs into a plug-in project.
Integration with JDT
- plug-in manifest files participate in Java search and refactoring.
User Assistance Tools - Editors and tools for developing user help and other UA documents.
Declarative Services Tools - Editors and validation for OSGi declarative services.
The goal of PDE Build is to facilitate the automation of plug-in build processes. Essentially, 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).
While PDE Build is still being maintained, it is not actively enhanced. For new builds, you can also consider other build systems like Maven Tycho or Gradle.
PDE API Tools
API tooling will assist developers in API maintenance by reporting API defects such as binary incompatibilities, incorrect plug-in version numbers, missing or incorrect @since tags, and usage of non-API code between plug-ins.
The tooling will be integrated in the Eclipse SDK and will be used in the automated build process.
Specifically, the tooling is designed to do the following:
Identify binary compatibility issues between two versions of a software component or product.
Update version numbers for plug-ins (bundles) based on the Eclipse versioning scheme.
Update @since tags for newly added classes, interfaces, methods, etc.
Provide new javadoc tags and code assist to annotate types with special restrictions.
Leverage existing information (in MANIFEST.MF) to define the visibility of packages between bundles.
Identify usage of non-API code between plug-ins.
Identity leakage of non-API types into API.Eclipse Project
About the Eclipse Project
The Eclipse Project is an open source project of eclipse.org, overseen
and project leaders. The work is done in subprojects working against . The
describes the organization of the project, roles and responsibilities of
the participants, and top level development process for the project. The
JDT and PDE are plug-in tools for the Eclipse Platform. Together, these
three pieces form the Eclipse SDK ,
a complete development environment for Eclipse-based tools, and for developing
Eclipse itself.
Release plans and other information about the Eclipse Project development process.
Download the Eclipse SDK, Eclipse RCP, SWT, the Eclipse Java compiler, and many more. You
can find the current release here.
Or, download the latest stable and integration builds if you want
to try out the newest features under development, or get started with contributing to the project.
Browse the documentation included with Eclipse Project releases.
Subprojects
The Platform defines the set of frameworks and common services that collectively
make up &integration-ware& required to support the use of Eclipse
as a component model, as a rich client platform ()
and as a comprehensive tool integration platform. These services and frameworks
include a standard workbench user interface model and portable native widget
toolkit, a project model for managing resources, automatic resource delta
management for incremental compilers and builders, language-independent
debug infrastructure, and infrastructure for distributed multi-user versioned
resource management.
The JDT provides the tool plug-ins for the platform that implement a Java
IDE for power-users, that supports the development of any Java application,
including Eclipse plug-ins. The JDT adds the notion of Java projects and
a Java perspective to the Eclipse platform, as well as a number of views,
editors, wizards, builders, and code merging and refactoring tools. The
JDT allows Eclipse to be a development environment for itself. The JDT plug-ins
themselves can also be further extended by other tool builders.
The PDE project provides a number of views and editors that make is easier
to build plug-ins for Eclipse. Using the PDE, you can create your plug-in
manifest file (plugin.xml), specify your plug-in runtime and other required
plug-ins, define extension points, including their specific markup, associate
XML Schema files with the extension point markup so extensions can be validated,
create extensions on other plug-in extension points, etc. The PDE makes
integrating plug-ins easy and fun.
The e4 project is an incubator for developing the next generation
of the Eclipse platform. The mission of the e4 project is to build a next
generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools.