It is out of scope of this manual to teach the reader on how to write Eclipse plug-ins. There are excellent books and on-line resources on this topic; we’ll list some of them below.
The most straightforward resources are the Eclipse manuals themselves. Open the Eclipse help system (Help -> Help Contents). If PDE is installed, you will find the following manuals in it:
Searching for developing Eclipse plug-ins on the web will reveal many good tutorials, overviews and other articles.
A more in-depth coverage of the topic is the book Eclipse Plug-ins, by Eric Clayberg and Dan Rubel. Former editions were titled Eclipse: Building Commercial-Quality Plug-ins, which might be familiar to more people. The book has an associated web site: http://www.qualityeclipse.com.
Another book that we found useful is The Official Eclipse 3.0 FAQs by John Arthorne and Chris Laffra. The book is now available online: http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/The_Official_Eclipse_FAQs.
One can find several more good books on amazon.com about Eclipse’s architecture, services, developing plug-ins.
The rest of this Manual assumes that you are familiar with Eclipse concepts and Eclipse plug-in development in general.