Friday, January 27, 2006

Eclipse: Extension-Points without Plug-Ins

The Eclipse developers have finished huge refactorings of the runtime for the Eclipse 3.2M4 build. The most interesting refactoring is the extraction of the extension-point-framework into separate bundles. The nice thing about this refactoring is that this extracted extension-point-framework can now be used standalone - without an OSGi runtime. This allows you to use the extension-point/extension techniques even in those settings that make it hard to deploy an OSGi runtime (like application servers).

To use the extracted extension-point framework you just need to install the appropriate JAR files into your classpath and tell the framework at startup time where to find the extension-point and extension definition files. Thats it!

Great work from the Eclipse team!!!

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