Eclipse extensibility

The Rational® UML modeling products themselves are built on the extensibility architecture provided by Eclipse, and this architecture is also available to you.

Plug-ins and the extension points that they provide are foundational to Eclipse extensibility. In fact, Eclipse is made up of a set of plug-ins. A plug-in is coded in Java and resides in a plug-ins directory. Each plug-in includes a manifest file that declares the extension points it provides to other plug-ins and the extension points it is making use of from other plug-ins. The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE), which is part of the Eclipse Software Development Kit (SDK), provides a set of tools to assist in all stages of plug-in development.

The Java development tooling (JDT) provided by Eclipse includes a Java IDE that can be used to add Java-specific behavior to the Eclipse platform and create plug-ins that interact with Java programs or resources.

An Eclipse component that is more closely related to modeling is the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Tools and applications built on this framework can generate efficient, customizable Java code from models. Within EMF, models are defined using XML Metadata Interchange (XMI). This standard file format eases model exchange between tools and the manipulation of related data. EMF is extended by the Eclipse Modeling Framework Technologies (EMFT) component which contains several technologies that complement the manipulation of EMF based models. These EMFT technologies are OCL, Query, Transactions and Validation.

To learn more about the framework and its associated application programming interfaces (APIs), see following topics in the online help:

The Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF) provides a generative component and runtime infrastructure for developing graphical editors based on EMF and the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF). This component also supplies exemplary tools for select domain models which illustrate its capabilities.

For model access at the appropriate level of abstraction, and in accordance with the Unified Modeling Language specification, use the UML APIs. These APIs provide an EMF-based implementation of the UML metamodel.

Note: Some information, such as links to Eclipse documentation or to developer guides, is available only from the help topics that are installed with the product.

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