Re: [platform-core-dev] Custom UI

[Philip Borlin <pborlin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks a lot Brian, that did the trick.  I appreciate your quick 
response.  Because of your help, I got a simple hello world application 
up and running.

> Just a warning: the current auto-update uses the org.eclipse.ui.startup 
> extension point and has a GUI portion that depends on the eclipse UI. It 
> is possible to write your own auto-update using update manager 
> operations api's, but you jut don't get it for free with a non-ui Eclipse.

Understood!  We are writing an internal app and weren't planning on 
exposing any ui to the user, but were more interested in 
auto-downloading new fixes on startup to reduce IT headaches.

> You will define the application extension in your plugin and provide a 
> class that
> implements IPlatformRunnable.
> This is the class that will get the control as soon as eclipse bootstraps.
> Here you may want to keep things running using an event loop, etc.

Let me just make a couple comments for historical purposes on things 
that tripped me up.  The extension is 
"org.eclipse.core.runtime.applications".  The first attribute is the id 
which should be a simple name of your application (such as "hello"). 
When you reference your application it will be in the form 
my.plugin.id.appid.  This caused me several hours of debugging nightmares.

When you want to run your application go to the run... menu and create a 
new Run-time Workbench.  In Program Arguments field add: "-application 
my.plugin.id.appid" to the end of the provided parameters.  That should 
do it!

-Phil