Section 2.3.  Putting a System Together - Eclipse Rich Client Platform: Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications

2.3. Putting a System Together

With all these plug-ins floating around, what does an Eclipse system look like on disk? Figure 2-4 shows a typical RCP SDK install. The top-most directory is the install location. It includes a plug-in store, some bootstrap code, and a launcher, eclipse.exe, which is used to start Eclipse.

The plug-in store contains a directory or JAR file for each plug-in. By convention, the name in the filesystem matches the identifier of the plug-in and is followed by its version number. Each plug-in contains its files and folders as described earlier.

The configuration location contains the configuration definition. This definition describes which plug-ins are to be installed into the Runtime and run by Eclipse. The configuration location is also available to plug-ins for storing settings and other data such as preferences and cached indexes. By default, the configuration location is part of the install location. This is convenient for standard single-user installs on machines where users have full control. Products and shared, or multi-configuration, installs on UNIX systems may, however, put the configuration location elsewhere, such as the current user's home directory.