Writing Eclipse plugins with Groovy

January 17, 2008

Writing plugins for Eclipse with other languages than Java is not officially supported, but there is a way to write an Eclipse plugin with Groovy only. As prerequisites you need Eclipse with a JDT and the Groovy Eclipse plugin.

Follow these steps.

  1. Create a new Plugin-in project, do not use any templates.
  2. Add the Groovy Nature to the project.
  3. Create a Java package under src
  4. Create a Groovy class HelloGroovyWorld with the contents shown below.
  5. Edit the plugin.xml file:
    1. On the Dependencies tab add org.eclipse.ui and org.eclipse.core.runtime. and org.codehaus.groovy.
    2. On the Runtime tab add bin-groovy to the classpath
    3. On the Extensions tab add an org.eclipse.ui.actionSets extension, set visible to true. Add a menu and an action (Left click the ActionSet, right click and choose “new, menu and action”) and choose HelloGroovyWorld as the class for the action. The plugin.xml is shown below.
   <extension
         point="org.eclipse.ui.actionSets">
      <actionSet
            id="hellogroovyworld.actionSet1"
            label="Groovy ActionSet"
            visible="true">
         <menu
               id="groovyMenu"
               label="Groovy Menu">
         </menu>
         <action
               class="hellogroovyworld.HelloGroovyWorld"
               id="hellogroovyworld.action2"
               label="Groovy World"
               menubarPath="groovyMenu"
               toolbarPath="groovyMenu"
               tooltip="Hello Groovy World">
         </action>
      </actionSet>
   </extension>

The source code:

package hellogroovyworld

import org.eclipse.jface.action.IAction
import org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ISelection
import org.eclipse.ui.IWorkbenchWindow
import org.eclipse.ui.IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate
import org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.MessageDialog

class HelloGroovyWorld implements IWorkbenchWindowActionDelegate {

      private IWorkbenchWindow window

      void run(IAction action) {
            MessageDialog.openInformation(
                  window.getShell(),
                  "Hellogroovyworld Plug-in",
                  "Hello, Groovy world")
      }

      void selectionChanged(IAction action, ISelection selection) {}

      void dispose() {}

      void init(IWorkbenchWindow window) {
            this.window = window
      }
}

Now run the project as an Eclipse Application:

Hello Groovy World
 Software Development
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