Contributing to the Eclipse Project: Principles, Plug-ins and Gerrit Code Review

by Lars Vogel (Editor)

This book gives a practical introduction how you can develop Eclipse software components and contribute back to the Eclipse open source project. It starts with an introduction to the structure of the Eclipse open source project and continues with the development of an Eclipse plug-in and how to deploy such a software component. Afterwards it covers the Git version control system and the Git tooling support via the Eclipse IDE. The next chapters describe how to contribute source code to the Eclipse open source project using the Eclipse platform project as an example. In this main part of the book the usage and configuration of the Eclipse Gerrit code review system is explained. This includes how to run the platform unit tests. Tools to analyze the Eclipse code base are presented and it is explained how to build the Eclipse IDE itself. The last chapters contain information and interviews with Eclipse foundation staff members and Eclipse project leads. The project leads describe their Eclipse projects and how to contribute to them. This includes for example JDT, Maven, CDT, Tycho, EGit, the PHP IDE and projects not hosted at Eclipse like the Spring Tools project, the JBoss Tools project and the PyDev IDE. After finishing this book you should feel comfortable working with the source code from projects hosted at Eclipse.org. This includes cloning and modifying Eclipse source code and contributing the result back to the Eclipse project using Git and Gerrit.

565 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 7, 2014