Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins

Chapter 4. Der Plan

The best way to tell you about Eclipse is to walk you through the development of an example. As we explained with the cucumber story in the preface, it should be no surprise that we'll use JUnit as our example. What is JUnit?

JUnit is a simple framework for writing automated tests. What makes JUnit interesting as an example is that it is a programming tool written by programmers for programmers, our prototypical Eclipse extension. Also, it is simple so we won't have to explain a lot of stuff that isn't Eclipse-related. While the user interfaces for JUnit to date have all been simple, there are many features we can imagine wanting to add, so JUnit has possibilities (some of which we uncovered in the course of writing this book). ...