Contributing to the Eclipse IDE Project: Principles, Plug-ins and Gerrit Code Review (vogella series)

This book gives a practical introduction how you can access the source code of Eclipse IDE projects and contribute features and fixes back to these open source projects. It starts with an introduction to the structure of the Eclipse open source project. Afterwards it explains how to configure the Eclipse IDE for code contributions and explains the usage of the Gerrit review system. Afterwards a short introduction into unit testing is given. This includes instructions how to run the Eclipse platform unit tests. The next part of the book serves as an introduction into Eclipse plug-in development. Tools to analyze the Eclipse code base are presented after this introduction, followed by instructions how to build the Eclipse IDE itself. Afterwards you find some background information in the form of interviews with the Eclipse foundation and several Eclipse project leads. This book assumes experience with programming in Java, in using the Eclipse IDE and assumes knowledge about using the Git version control system.