Export into the Host Eclipse

April 23, 2009 | 1 min Read

In the traditional RCP development workflow, you find yourself self-hosting a lot. If you don’t know what self-hosting means, it’s simply the process of launching a new Eclipse instance and executing the bundles you were working on in your workspace. This works well as there’s no real deployment step, but what happens if you want to run what you’re working on inside your current running Eclipse (host)? Well, you could use the classic, “export, copy, paste, delete, restart” technique" but that’s not optimal and takes some time. How do we get around this? Well, in Eclipse 3.5, PDE has new functionality to directly export into your host.  To demonstrate this functionality, let’s create a sample project using the ‘Hello, World Command’ template:

Then let’s export into our host using a new option in the export wizard:

Once we export and apply changes, we should see the sample plug-in installed and running (check the toolbar):

To uninstall, simply go to the ‘Installation Details’ page via the About page:

Hope this helps! I also created a video of this workflow in case anyone is interested.