Chapter 27. Eclipse.org Plug-ins
The success of a platform can be measured by the size of its community, and ultimately, by the number of applications built with it. As the size of a community increases, so does the collection of components that are produced and made availableeither commercially or for free. By these metrics, Eclipse is a huge success. The community is vibrant, the number of projects doing interesting and widely relevant work is impressive, and several of the world's major software companies are members of the Eclipse Foundation. This translates into a huge number of useful, quality plug-ins that save you time and money.
You probably noticed that the RCP SDK includes only a few plug-ins. In fact, at last count, the RCP download contained just 16 plug-ins (including 2 source plug-ins). In Part II, you learned how to add Eclipse Platform plug-ins such as Help and Update to Hyperbola. The Eclipse SDK includes more than 85 plug-ins, many of which are useful in RCP applications. Add that to the others available at Eclipse.org and the hundreds available on Web sites such as sourceforge.net and eclipseplugincentral.com and it is clear that a key part of developing an RCP application is deciding which existing plug-ins to use and how they help solve the problems of your application domain.
A complete survey of the existing plug-ins is beyond the scope of this book and would likely be obsolete before it even reached your hands. Instead, this chapter contains an overview of the plug-ins in the Eclipse SDK that can be used in RCP applications.
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