Build command line tools on top of Eclipse

Eclipse is great! Isn’t it ?

Recently some of my RCP application customers asked me to have a command line version of the application. This application parses some binary trace files and provides analyses of it which results are displayed in several Eclipse views. The point here was to output “CSV versions” of this views through a command line tool.

Thanks to the modularity of Eclipse it was really easy to add in the following architecture:

a new Command Line tool plugin contributing a command line application through the org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications extension point.

Yes it is as simple as it looks like excepted may be the following tips to remember:

1. Always remove useless dependencies in all your plugins
2. Ensure that Activators of plugins not contributing to the workbench extends AbstractPlugin and not AbstractUIPlugin
3. Always isolate UI code in a dedicated plugin, otherwise it’ll be a nightmare to have a command line tool.
4. Keep in mind that almost everything can be done with Eclipse

Manu

 

 

About these ads