Chapter 2. Setting Up Eclipse for Plug-In Development

Developing plug-ins is a little different than developing vanilla Java applications. First, you need to be able to refer to Eclipse's own internal structure to extend that structure. Second, you will spend much of your early hours as an Eclipse contributor reading source code, so you need access to all the source.

One way to solve these problems is to load the entire source (around one million lines of code) into the workspace. Managing this huge amount of source can expand the memory footprint of Eclipse. However, we will typically only read existing code and not modify or compile it. Fortunately, PDE offers a quick and space-efficient way to set up a workspace where existing plug-ins cannot ...

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