How to develop Eclipse GUI plugins

Question

I want to develop a GUI plugin inside Eclipse such that I can expose a set of tasks and the user can drag-drop the tasks in the editor canvas and create connections between them like a workflow. A -> B -> C. In the background this would generate a set of Java classes with custom code. Any pointers to what resources do I have for such a plugin ?

Answer 1

Besides the basic SWT/Eclipse references given by Stephen, you could look into GEF for the graphical part, perhaps in its combination with EMF in GMP . For generating the target code, you could look into Jet or Xpand .

Answer 2

These books are a good place to start:

• Eclipse Plug-ins (3rd Edition) by Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel
• SWT/JFace in Action: GUI Design with Eclipse 3.0 (In Action series) by Matthew Scarpino, Stephen Holder, Stanford Ng, and Laurent Mihalkovic

And of course, there's the Eclipse documentation .