Development of an Eclipse Plug-in for Toolchain Integration

Requirements

To develop an Eclipse Plug-in that will automatically create makefile and build (compile, assemble and link) a C Project using the specified tools.

Understanding the plug-in terminologies
Understanding about Eclipse plug-in development
- How to create, test, debug and deploy plug-in
Providing easy to use interfaces/GUI

Environment
OS
Windows
Language/Platform
Eclipse Europa with CDT 4.0.3

or

Eclipse Ganymede with CDT 5.0.1
Development model Incremental development model
Features
- Support for Environment Variable 'Path'
- Modifiable command line pattern
- View of the default command line options updated for the tools
- Dividing the command line options into a hierarchy of categories
- Easy interface for choosing the tool command line options
Description

The CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) Project provides a fully functional C and C++ Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the Eclipse platform. CDT provides a framework for integrating tools into Eclipse and the managed build system is part of that framework. The CDT managed build system offers GNU makefiles to build executables, static libraries, and shared libraries using the GNU compiler collection (GCC), by default. In addition, it provides option to configure tools other than GCC.

Since we are also working with tools other than GCC, we decided to create a Toolchain Integration Plug-in such that it could create makefiles and build our tools in CDT. Using the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), we extended the Eclipse CDT Managed Build System and developed the Toolchain Integration Plug-in. The project had four phases in which tools were integrated to the plug-in incrementally and the project was completed in the planned schedule.