Integrating software productivity tools into Eclipse

Abstract

This paper presents a framework designed to ease the process of building GUIs for software productivity tools in Eclipse. This framework provides a general system with which external tools may display graphs and trees within Eclipse and may link these displays to source code. In addition, our framework can retrieve information from Eclipse, passing it back to the user's external tools for further processing. Combining these pieces of functionality gives users an intuitive and powerful interface to existing productivity tools and provides developers an easy way of extending those tools.The paper also presents examples of two program productivity tools -- a memory leak detector and a security vulnerability detector -- which we have successfully integrated with our framework.