blob: f87c8a04eef8d1ae8bc0ad3cfd94c640cf4b22ea [file]
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"><HTML>
<HEAD>
<meta name="copyright" content="Copyright (c) IBM Corporation and others 2000, 2005. This page is made available under license. For full details see the LEGAL in the documentation book that contains this page." >
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Style-Type" CONTENT="text/css">
<LINK REL="STYLESHEET" HREF="../book.css" CHARSET="ISO-8859-1" TYPE="text/css">
<title>Setting up PDE</title>
</head>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff">
<h1>Preparing the workbench</h1>
<p>While you can access the PDE platform contributions from any perspective, the
PDE perspective is arguably the best.&nbsp; </p>
<p>From the default Resource perspective, open the PDE perspective via
<b>Window &gt; Open Perspective &gt; Other...
</b> and
choose <b>Plug-in Development</b> from the offered list.</p>
<p align="center"> <img src="images/pdeperspective.png" alt="PDE perspective"></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>In addition to the main views and toolbar actions that are useful for Java
development, the PDE perspective adds shortcuts to very frequently used wizards
such as the New Plug-in Project creation wizard, etc. It also adds
views that are very important to a plug-in developer including the <b>Error Log</b>
view.</p>
<h2>Error Log</h2>
<p>The <b>Error Log</b> view captures all internal warnings and errors thrown by the platform
and by your code.&nbsp;
These errors are written to a <b>.log</b> file that is located in the <b>
.metadata</b> subdirectory of your workspace, and the Error Log view shows the
content of this file with a variety of convenient options such as filtering,
sorting, etc.</p>
<p>By default, once the Error Log view is in your workspace, it will be brought
to the front upon the logging of new events.&nbsp; This feature can be turned
on/off in the drop down menu of the view.</p>
<p>Other features of the log view include the ability to import any arbitrary
log file into the view, and to export the log contents into a file.</p>
<p align="center"> <img border="0" src="images/errorLog.png" alt="Error Log view" ></p>
</body>
</html>