Commercial Plug-ins for Eclipse: A Field Report on Avoiding Development Pitfalls

Source: SYS-CON BRASIL

Summary:
As we enter 2006, there’s nothing stopping the spread of Eclipse, the open source development environment. The steadily growing number of free and commercial plug-ins available attests to its success. It’s now time to report on our experiences in developing the visual rules plug-in for Eclipse. Caroline Buck (pictured) shows you how to steer clear of the pitfalls in development.

The core idea of Innovations rule technology consists of two components: the graphical modeling of business logic and the generation of executable program code from the models. At the end of 2002 we decided to redesign our rule system. It was quickly apparent that the existing Java applications for modeling and for code generation should become an Eclipse plug-in or a whole range of Eclipse plug-ins.