Plug-in Overview

The Overview page serves a dual purpose:

1. It contains two main sections that define important plug-in properties: General Information and Execution Environments.
2. It functions as a quick reference on how to develop, test and deploy plug-ins by providing the Plug-in Content, Extensions, Testing and Exporting sections. These sections provide hyperlinks that, when clicked, navigate to other pages or invoke commands.

General Information

An ID is mandatory and must comply with the plugin.dtd.

A Version is mandatory and must be of the form major.minor.micro.qualifier (e.g. 1.3.0).

A Name is the translatable presentation name of the plug-in. This field is required.

A Vendor is the translatable name of the plug-in vendor. This field is optional.

A Platform filter is a valid LDAP string that must evaluate to true in a running system for the the plug-in to run. For example, the following filter indicates that the plug-in is designed to only run on platforms with a win32 windowing system: Eclipse-PlatformFilter: (ws=win32). If a user attempts to run Eclipse on a platform that does not meet this requirement, the plug-in will be silently ignored by the runtime.

An Activator is a Java class that controls the plug-in's life cycle. It is only needed if you require work to be done on the startup or shutdown of your plug-in.

Execution Environments

A bundle execution environment specifies the minimum level of JRE required for the plug-in to run. If the JRE used to run Eclipse does not meet the requirement, the plug-in will not run.

Press the Add... button to browse a list of available execution environments and add one that is most suitable for your plug-in. For example, if you declare J2SE-1.4 as your plug-in's bundle execution environment, your plug-in will only run with a JRE version >= 1.4.

If your plug-in can run in an execution environment that is not a proper subset of the execution environment specified (e.g. J2SE-1.4 and CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1), both execution environments should be specified.

During a plug-in export, the plug-in code is compiled against the JRE associated with the first execution environment listed in the MANIFEST.MF file .  Click on the Configure JRE associations... link to open the Windows > Preferences... > Java > Installed JREs > Execution Environments preference page for a list of OSGi execution environments and their corresponding list of compatible JREs installed on the system.

Whenever you update the list of execution environments for your plug-in, you should Update the classpath settings via the link to ensure you are compiling against the right JRE and have the settings that best match your first execution environment.

Related references