Eclipse 4 RCP (aka E4) documentation

Question

Is there at least anything other than Vogella's tutorials and his book, which is completely based on those tuts? Examples from his repo are often either incomplete/unfinished/won't run and those examples even don't match the book actually..
I'd like to find at least some javadoc for this, because any step to a side and I'm completely lost on how to accomplish different tasks and what functionality is available.

Wax

I never had the chance to read them but at wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/Tutorials there are some more tutorials – Tricolor

yeah, i've seen those, thx. But it's still just a couple of tutorials, while I'm searching for real docs OR sources of whatever comprises this E4 thing. I can't even find what actually constitutes the E4... – Wax

@david: are you developing using E4 yourself? if so, how did you start? – Wax

Answer 1

After almost 2 years there has been no decent response to this question. So i'm considering the Eclipse E4 platform efectively dead, as there are still people voting for this question and can't find an answer.

The only answer I have is - move to the NetBeans Platform. There are similar problems there, but at least people do answer in the mailing list and there are books which are quite more recent and are actually providing working source code! Enve the NetBeans website provides free tutorial on a lot of stuff for free!

I mean it's really hard to believe, but you should try NetBeans platform - it's the only choice.

Wax

Answer 2

Lars Vogel's Tutorials are the most complete and up-to-date documentation on Eclipse 4 development. Second to this is asking questions in Eclipse 4 Community Forum. Last option is to google for specific technical problems, which will in most cases lead you to blog posts from the same people that are active on the forums. (Mainly single supporters like Lars, some Eclipse devs and the guys from www.eclipsesource.com)

I discourage using the wiki, since much of the information may be outdated and may be more confusing than an actual help. Documentation for JFace and SWT can be reused from Eclipse 3.x since there are few to none changes in Eclipse E4.

Benham

it is just so strange that there is so much hype about E4 and no real docs.. just some tutorials. And it is also strange that Eclipse is always advertised as being open source - but have you tried finding the sources? – Wax

I probably won't get too many answers for this question, so I'll have to accept this ont ;) I've seen those tuts already and posted in the forums. Basically at this point it turns out that I can not do much more, than there is in the tut.. and there is no way to learn more. – Wax

Yes, Eclipse is not too inviting to beginners. Eclipse 3 had at least a good reference documentation and some decent books available, but that was during the peak of the hype. But don't undervalue those tutorials, they are as good as any book has been in the past. It's all there ;) – Benham

Is there any update to this answer as of Jan 2014? I've been programming "E3" RCP for about 18 months and now transitioning to E4. After all that time I barely know E3. I'm having a very hard time, investing a lot of energy for slow returns. Vogel's tutorials are too dense for the beginner. Assumes knowledge of concepts and language, and I've been finding the examples difficult to generalize. How do people learn this stuff? – Slain

I'm just starting out with eclipse, and very frustrated with lack of docs - good to know that at least 3x docs can be leveraged for the JFace/SWT components. – Torrential

Answer 3

E4 is alive and many of its components are now encapsulated in the standard Eclipse Platform. So most of Eclipse 3 docs and books are still relevant, as well as the Eclipse 4 ones.

If you want to understand the theory, you should start searching Eclipse conference slides explaining the Eclipse Platform and plug-ins. Trust me, it might sound old-style, but most of the times I find an EclipseCon Powerpoint or PDF, it is a great presentation, concentrating in 30 minutes the great work of some of the best Eclipse developers. If I had to re-start learning Eclipse, I would start again from some EclipseCon slides talking about Eclipse Plugins and Eclipse E4 Model.

For Eclipse4 or E4, we mean the Eclipse4 Model, which is now part of the Eclipse Platform. The Eclipse IDE itself supports both 3.x and Eclipse4 programming.

If you want to start Eclipse4, you should take a good book or a tutorial and follow it step by step. As an example you have these books:

• Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) 2nd edition
• Contributing to the Eclipse IDE Project (free ebook)
• Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example: Beginner's Guide
• Instant Eclipse 4 RCP Development How-to

However, there are a lot of sources of information, as many books, web tutorials and blogs. You can find most of them here:

• https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Articles,_Tutorials,_Demos,_Books,_and_More
• https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse4/Tutorials
• http://planeteclipse.org/planet/

In my personal list of who to follow, I could include: Vogella RCP, EclipseSource, Tom Schindl, OpCoach, RCPVision, Kai Toedter, AllBlue, Wim Yongman, and all the E4 Contributors who are writing articles. But it is unfair not to mention all of them.

If you're not satisfied by docs and tutorials, please file a bug to the Eclipse Platform; mention "missing documents to use E4" and specify what you need. The Platform UI team will take care of this, either by linking the existing documentation to the above wiki page or by creating the missing docs.

Note: Several of the developers of the Eclipse E4 and Platform team contributed to the success of the technology by fixing bugs, writing code, documents, tutorials, and opening businesses based on this.

Eclipse committers are writing most of the existing documents, and they usually go to conferences. So, usually, you get their very best at the Eclipse Conferences. If you get their slides, you can get the best of some Eclipse and Java Champions, condensed in 30 slides, or in a video of 30 minutes.

You can start contributing to open source, by following tutorials, like those written by Eclipse Committers, and then you can give back by writing documents to capture your achievements ;)

But, keep in mind that a tutorial is not a book. There is a different process behind. Thankfully those great developers found the time to write code and documentation at the same time.

Towards

You do realize that you're answering to a 3 year old question, right? Regarding your note - it's completely irrelevant. He is the main contributor and developer and makes money off training, I understand that, but that doesn't help me getting started. Among the links that you've shared show me at least one which gives at least a starter guide? You say there are many books. Hmm.. let's check out your link, aha! There's exactly one book about developing using the RCP! And it's the same book that was there 3 years ago! Nice. – Wax

You should look the answer of the 25 September 2015, made by the author: "After almost 2 years there has been no decent response to this question." This means that in September 2015 the answer is still valid. About relevance: i put 3 links to all the tutorials available, plus I added the names of the book authors. As example "AllBlue" wrote one of the other books about E4 RCP – Towards

Concluding, I pointed to all the available documents, all the authors, and on how to ask for missing documentation, as it is a collaborative process. So, if the author does not understand this, I would say the question is not relevant. – Towards

Did you really read my answer? (1) "E4 is now integrated into Platform" make the readers understand that Eclipse 3 documentation is still relevant, as well as the Eclipse 4. (2) One reading your question might think the tutorials are a bad source of information. This is misleading I'm an Eclipse contributor ant those tutorials are relevant. (2) First link, resource n°313: Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development By example is another good book. I can mention all good ones – Towards

I'm not really interested in plug-in development, it might still be a way to learn something about how things are done the Eclipse way, but I just wanted to use it as an RCP platform. I don't even understand what you mean by "E4 is now integrated into Platform". Wasn't E4 the platform? E3 was just the previous version with a different coding model and with E4 all APIs and extension points were mostly replaced by injection (and at the time it wasn't described anywhere which components can be injected)? Why is there a distinction between the Platform and those Ex abbreviations? – Wax

I don't know if you've tried the NetBeans Platform, but that's what I was expecting from Eclipse RCP. Provide a windowing system for me, some easy way to extend menus, hook up into messaging system, get some default implementations for Options menus, wizards etc. After reading the Vogel's book and spending 3 months I could create windows and that was basically it. I'm not a very good developer. – Wax

I started using Netbeans in 2002 and Eclipse in 2005. Netbeans is simpler to start, but you can not reuse the software of big enterprises for your business. Eclipse is an Ecosystem for Component- Based software (not object-oriented). To leverage those components it is needed to understand the difference between Eclipse IDE and Eclipse Platform. – Towards

Nobody born as a good developer, but we can improve. I'm doing my best to improve. – Towards

I do understand the difference. I think you didn't quite understand me about NetBeans Platform. The NetBeans Platform is exactly the same thing as the Eclipse Platform. The NetBeans IDE is built using it just as Eclipse IDE is built using Eclipse Platform. It is also component based (called modules there) you can check it out here netbeans.org/features/platform/all-docs.html. Here is a starter tutorial to get the feel of it: platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-quick-start.html. Now compare that tutorial list which covers most platform stuff to the list you gave. – Wax

Eclipse IDE is made of plug-ins, built according to the OSGi specification made following a community process. For this and for the business Friendly EPL, it was adopted by many of the major software enterprises in the world. (#1 eclipse.org/membership/exploreMembership.php). Netbeans is expression of one company only, and there is no Ecosystem, that is the fundamental component for enterprises, developers and adopters. – Towards

My final suggestion: if you want to understand the theory, you should start searching powerpoints and pdfs of Eclipse conferences that explain the Eclipse Platform and plug-ins. Trust me, it might sound old-style, but most of the times I find an EclipseCon Powerpoint or PDF, it is a great presentation, concentrating in 30 minutes the great work of some of the best Eclipse developers. If I had to re-start learning Eclipse, I would start again from some EclipseCon slides talking about Eclipse Plugins and Eclipse E4 Model. – Towards

Answer 4

i was in the same position for my sparetime RCP-Project and was about to give up

since Neon the situation has been improved a lot

my approach

• take the tycho-Example from vogella for headless-build

• add your custom parts with 'hello world' and play around to learn

• for database-access use a declarative Service using jpa

an example will be

http://relations-rcp.sourceforge.net/

for logging and error-view

https://github.com/buchen/portfolio

this project eye-opening!

in general:

search Application.e4xmi in Github by date descending and you will find excelent examples and full working products

Forget about e3 and stick to plain e4. Take Advantage of the latest api's

• make a i18n plugin and use

  @Inject @Translation Messages messages;

• use ISideEffect as Binding

for me it becomes fun to code with e4

Peacoat

Answer 5

For anyone who stumbles here looking for an e4 example, here's a simple basic example on using eclipse 4 rcpeclipse 4: rcp getting started

Comptom

this one doesn't go anywhere beyond what you can find on Lars Vogel's website. The problems begin when you start moving a little further and get trapped by things like Explorer not working without compatibility layer to Eclipse 3, or trying to understand how the internal message bus works, what is the proper design to really decouple components (if just start bluntly using the platform you'll end up writing code that will be still wholly dependent on parts of self..). e4 is huge, 10 pages of tutorials with pictures is not enough to really start with it. – Wax

I know that Lars Vogel's is the best place to learn e4 deeply. That's why I called it SIMPLE BASIC example. It's not a tutorial where you can master e4, it's just a taste of the framework. duh. – Comptom

Answer 6

Standard Eclipse documentation for version 4.3 (Kepler) contains javadoc for the most part of e4 project:

http://help.eclipse.org/kepler/topic/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/reference/api/overview-summary.html?cp=2_1_0

Belostok