Section 27.1.  Where to Find Plug-ins

27.1. Where to Find Plug-ins There are two main reasons to look for additional plug-ins: either you are looking to augment your Eclipse IDE with more tooling (e.g., Web tooling, C tools, AspectJ, etc.) or you need more function for your RCP application. You can find both in the following places. Before going on a treasure hunt for plug-ins, read Section 23.6, "Designing a Platform," to learn how to identify plug-ins that are meant to be reused in RCP applications. Some plug-ins are written for a particular product and are not what we call RCP-friendly. Eclipse SDK (eclipse.org/downloads) The SDK includes more than 85 plug-ins, including Java tooling (JDT), plug-in tooling (PDE), Help, Update, and various other bits and pieces. Chances are you are using the SDK to develop your plug-ins, but you might also want to include some of these in your target application. Eclipse Tools (eclipse.org/tools) The Eclipse Tools project includes many interesting and useful tooling extensions for the Eclipse IDE. These include the GEF, EMF, a visual editor (VE), UML2 tools, and so on. Several of these projects (e.g., GEF and EMF) contain runtime elements that you add to your application. Eclipse Technology (eclipse.org/technology) The Eclipse Technology project includes all manner of experimental and not-so-experimental work on tooling and runtime technologies. There are sub-projects for aspect-oriented development/runtimes, collaborative development, embedded RCP runtimes, voice tooling, communications infrastructure, and much more. Again, some of these projects include additional tooling for your development environment, some include runtime elements for your target, and some include both. Other Eclipse projects Eclipse.org hosts a number of other top-level projects such as Web tooling (WTP), test and performance (TPTP), and reporting (BIRT). Again, some are strictly tooling to help you build or implement your application, and some include or generate application runtime facilities. Links to community resources The Eclipse community is very active and includes many sites that either host or point to collections of plug-ins. The community resources page at http://eclipse.org/community/sources.html#links includes links to the major plug-in repositories and directories. Search the Web There are many other sources for Eclipse plug-ins. For example, http://eclipseplugincentral.com and http://sourceforge.net host hundreds of Eclipse plug-ins.