Your first Application based on Eclipse - FAQ

Short Story

We have just published a tutorial in which we try to answer the most frequently asked questions about starting to develop an application based on Eclipse. It is focused on using Eclipse as a platform, not only as an IDE:

See here for the tutorial.

Long Story

Eclipse is not only an IDE, but also a platform to build applications and tools. The “Eclipse Platform” is a mature and powerful framework with a modular architecture and hundreds of open source frameworks that can significantly reduce the cost of an implementation project. However, Eclipse is also known to add new and sometimes complex concepts to the standard Java world Because these complexities might not be known from the start, this can lead to some frustration, non-optimal architectural decisions, and therefore unnecessary additional effort.

From our experience in various Eclipse-based projects, we observe a number of frequently recurring questions and issues. Some examples of which are listed below:

• Should we use Eclipse 3.x or e4?
• How can we set-up a build?
• How should we split and configure bundles?
• Why and how do we use a target platform?
• Which OSGi features are important for our project?
• How can we test an Eclipse application?
• Which additional technologies should we use?

We gave a talk at EclipseCon, where we tried to answer the most common questions. Based on that, we have created a textual version, which we would now like to share as an online tutorial. It highlights the most important issues to consider and pitfalls to avoid. One article is certainly not enough to cover all these critical issues in detail, our goal is to simply give an overview of the frequently asked questions and create an awareness for the most common issues. We provide some blueprint solutions, guidelines, and initial pointers for where to get more information and how to address them in detail. We hope this provides useful information, especially for Eclipse newbies:

See here for the tutorial.