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As Eclipse plug-in and Rich Client Platform developers, we face unique challenges in how we structure and execute our unit tests. In this article, I suggest an approach to unit testing based on Eclipse fragments that can help us overcome these challenges. If you find yourself frustrated with your current plug-in testing options, read on! But before going into detail on a fragment based solution, let's examine the current approaches and the pros and cons associated with each. The first approach is the one most of us start with as we learn the ropes of plug-in development: placing all code in a single plug-in.

Aspect-oriented computing is continuing to increase in popularity. The modularity inherent in OSGi and Eclipse offers unique opportunities for managing and applying aspects by supplying them in bundles and directing their application to particular sets of bundles. This incubator work area is dedicated to delivering an integration of aspects and OSGi. The goal is to allow developers to use the Equinox together with AspectJ by combining the benefits of both worlds. Using a load-time weaving extension you are able to add AspectJ aspects to your bundle-based system just by putting them into general OSGi bundles. It does not matter if the pointcuts you defined inside the aspects contain join points that are defined by classes within the same bundle or any other bundle in your installation. The load-time weaving extension will take care that your aspects are woven with the appropriate classes at load-time. To illustrate this lets assume the following situation: You would like to write an aspect that traces something within the JDT plug-ins of Eclipse. Without some kind of load-time aspect weaving you would somehow need to recompile those JDT plug-ins using AJDT (for example) together with your aspect. By using the load-time aspect weaving extension all you need is to implement your aspect and add that bundle to your system. The load-time aspect weaving extension takes care of weaving your aspect with the JDT code as it is loaded. And it doesn't matter if a new JDT is installed by the user later on. The next time your application is started the load-time aspect weaving will take care of weaving your aspect into these bundles as well, if necessary. With this technology is becomes possible to modularize crosscutting concerns across different plug-ins while keeping the idea of separate compilation for bundles. Goals Provide Runtime Modularity and Versioning for Crosscutting Concerns: Aspects are used to implement crosscutting concerns. However such concerns usually compr

The JDT project provides the tool plug-ins that implement a Java IDE supporting the development of any Java application, including Eclipse plug-ins. It adds a Java project nature and Java perspective to the Eclipse Workbench as well as a number of views, editors, wizards, builders, and code merging and refactoring tools. The JDT project allows Eclipse to be a development environment for itself.

Eclipse SVN plug-in installation instructions

JMock is a library that supports test-driven development1 of Java2 code with mock objects3. Mock objects help you design and test the interactions between the objects in your programs.

"JMock is a library that supports test-driven development of Java code with mock objects. Mock objects help you design and test the interactions between the objects in your programs. The jMock library: makes it quick and easy to define mock objects, so you don't break the rhythm of programming. lets you precisely specify the interactions between your objects, reducing the brittleness of your tests. works well with the autocompletion and refactoring features of your IDE plugs into your favourite test framework is easy to extend."

"There are pros and cons for considering validation as business logic, and Spring offers a design for validation (and data binding) that does not exclude either one of them. Specifically validation should not be tied to the web tier, should be easy to localize and it should be possible to plug in any validator available. Considering the above, Spring has come up with a Validator interface that is both basic ands eminently usable in every layer of an application. Data binding is useful for allowing user input to be dynamically bound to the domain model of an application (or whatever objects you use to process user input). Spring provides the so-called DataBinder to do exactly that. The Validator and the DataBinder make up the validation package, which is primarily used in but not limited to the MVC framework. The BeanWrapper is a fundamental concept in the Spring Framework and is used in a lot of places. However, you probably will not have the need to use the BeanWrapper directly. Because this is reference documentation however, we felt that some explanation might be in order. We will explain the BeanWrapper in this chapter since, if you were going to use it at all, you would most likely do so when trying to bind data to objects. Spring's DataBinder and the lower-level BeanWrapper both use PropertyEditors to parse and format property values. The PropertyEditor concept is part of the JavaBeans specification, and is also explained in this chapter. Spring 3 introduces a "core.convert" package that provides a general type conversion facility, as well as a higher-level "format" package for formatting UI field values. These new packages may be used as simpler alternatives to PropertyEditors, and will also be discussed in this chapter."

"Eclipse Plug-in for tailing log files and eclipse consoles (e.g. SVN, Java Stack Trace, CDT), including syntax coloring with either a regular expression or a word match. It allows you to have multiple logs open concurrently. "

"Spring Surf is a view composition framework for Spring MVC that plugs into your existing Spring applications. It provides a scriptable and content-centric approach to building web applications. You can drop Spring Surf right into your existing Spring web applications or you can begin building new Spring Surf applications using SpringSource Tool Suite or Spring Roo's command-line magic."

The Simple Logging Facade for Java or (SLF4J) serves as a simple facade or abstraction for various logging frameworks, e.g. java.util.logging, log4j and logback, allowing the end user to plug in the desired logging framework at deployment time. Before you start using SLF4J, we highly recommend that you read the two-page SLF4J user manual. In case you wish to migrate your Java source files to SLF4J, consider our migrator tool which can migrate your project into SLF4J in minutes. In case an externally-maintained component you depend on uses a logging API other than SLF4J, such as commons logging, log4j or j.u.l, have a look at SLF4J's binary-support for legacy APIs.

Apache CXF is an open source services framework. CXF helps you build and develop services using frontend programming APIs, like JAX-WS and JAX-RS. These services can speak a variety of protocols such as SOAP, XML/HTTP, RESTful HTTP, or CORBA and work over a variety of transports such as HTTP, JMS or JBI. CXF includes a broad feature set, but it is primarily focused on the following areas: Web Services Standards Support: CXF supports a variety of web service standards including SOAP, the WS-I Basic Profile, WSDL, WS-Addressing, WS-Policy, WS-ReliableMessaging, WS-Security, WS-SecurityPolicy, WS-SecureConverstation, and WS-Trust (partial). Frontends: CXF supports a variety of "frontend" programming models. CXF implements the JAX-WS APIs (TCK compliant). CXF JAX-WS support includes some extensions to the standard that make it significantly easier to use, compared to the reference implementation: It will automatically generate code for request and response bean classes, and does not require a WSDL for simple cases. It also includes a "simple frontend" which allows creation of clients and endpoints without annotations. CXF supports both contract first development with WSDL and code first development starting from Java. For REST, CXF also supports a JAX-RS (TCK compliant) frontend. Ease of use: CXF is designed to be intuitive and easy to use. There are simple APIs to quickly build code-first services, Maven plug-ins to make tooling integration easy, JAX-WS API support, Spring 2.x XML support to make configuration a snap, and much more. Binary and Legacy Protocol Support: CXF has been designed to provide a pluggable architecture that supports not only XML but also non-XML type bindings, such as JSON and CORBA, in combination with any type of transport. To get started using CXF, check out the downloads, the user's guide, or the mailing lists to get more information!

The goal of the Eclipse Scout project is making it easy to build distributed enterprise applications based on the Eclipse platform. It consists of a runtime framework providing transparent service communication between the client and backend part and is shipped with a rich set of common user interface components. The user interface is not built for a particular rendering technology but it encapsulates the core functionality into a headless model. GUI factories are available for rendering the client model into a particular target UI platform. SWT and Swing are supported out of the box and an AJAX GUI factory could be easily added. Developing Scout applications is supported by the Scout SDK, a plug-in set built on top of Eclipse PDE and Eclipse JDT. The Scout SDK works directly on the bare Java resources and assists the development task by providing an augmented view on the underlying Java code. Additionally, it comes with a rich set of wizards and operations for modifying the Scout application project just by editing the underlying Java code. There is no meta-data required. Hence a developer can switch between editing resources using Eclipse's standard editors and leveraging the features of Scout SDK at any point in time. Eclipse Scout can be used to create multi-tier client/server applications, standalone client applications or OSGi-based server applications. Basically, there are three main advantages when choosing Scout as your framework for building such applications. First, the Scout runtime is service oriented by design. Almost every functionality is provided as an OSGi service. Every OSGi bundle may make use of them. Second, Scout provides a rich set of UI elements being uncoupled from a particular GUI technology. And third, building distributed client/server applications is as easy as if both parts would run within the same local JVM.

Switching between Apple and Oracle Java plugin