Plug-in Development Environment Overview

The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) provides tools to create, develop, test, debug, build and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments, features, update sites and RCP products.

PDE also provides comprehensive OSGi tooling, which makes it an ideal environment for component programming, not just Eclipse plug-in development.

PDE is broken into three main components:

Discover the latest features in the What's New section.

PDE UI

PDE UI provides a editors, wizards, launchers, views and other tools to create a full featured environment to develop and deploy Eclipse plug-ins, fragments, features, update sites, RCP products and OSGi bundles.

Some of the PDE tools include:

To get started, try out the following cheat sheets:

API Tools

API Tools assists in the documentation and maintenance of APIs provided by plug-ins and OSGi bundles.

Some of the features include:

To get started, see the tasks:

PDE Build

PDE Build facilitates the automation of plug-in build processes. PDE Build produces Ant scripts based on development-time information provided by, for example, the plugin.xml and build.properties files. The generated Ant scripts, can fetch the relevant projects from a CVS repository, build jars, Javadoc, source zips, put everything together in a format ready to ship and send it out to a remote location (e.g., a local network or a downloads server).

To get started, see the following: