If you are already a PDE UI developer, check out the Development Resources.

The Plug-In Development Environment (PDE) is a collection of integrated tools targeted at you, the plug-in developer. Some of PDE's contributions to the Eclipse workbench include:

• New Plug-in, fragment, feature and update site projects creation wizards.
• Multi-page editors to edit manifest files for plug-ins, fragments, features and update sites.
• Import wizards to import external plug-ins, fragments and features.
• Export wizards to build, package and deploy plug-ins, fragments and features.
• a launcher to test and debug your plug-in.
• a search engine to search for plug-ins, fragments, extensions, and extension points with a scope that goes beyond the workspace.
• a log view with sorting, filtering capabilities to view the contents of the log file.

Over the next 6 months the major focus points are:

• RCP tooling.
• Runtime/OSGi tooling.
• Improving feature development tooling.
• Enhancing existing features.
• Reducing the defect backlog

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.

3.2 Development Effort - Milestone 2 (September 23, 2005)

• Rich Client Platform
  • Enhance the New Plug-in Project Creation wizard to allow the creation of a headless rich client application.
  • Provide a Hello World headless RCP template.
  • Add Intro support to the RCP Product editor.
• Runtime/OSGi
  • Enhance the New Plug-in Project Creation wizard to allow the creation of a pure OSGi bundle that is not dependent on the runtime layer.
  • Implement an OSGi Application launcher.
• An Integrated IDE
  • Plug-in working sets should participate in builds, view filtering, searches.
  • Participate in refactoring (manifest.mf, plugin.xml and fragment.xml files).
• Eclipse Application launcher
  • Make the launch configurations portable.
  • Make the launcher tabs and the runner configuration API.
• Reduce the defect backlog.

If you are interested in participating in the development of the PDE UI component, check out the developer's mailing list: pde-ui-dev@eclipse.org. Chat with people there about your problems and interests, and find out what you can do to help.

In particular, if you have written (or have ideas for) any utilities, "spy" functions, code generators, transformers, importers, exporters, or any other code that you find useful (or would find useful) for development of plug-ins, and would like to get involved in getting the function integrated as part of PDE, we would like to hear from you.

For more detailed information, check out the Development Resources.