Plug-in Development Environment Overview

The Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) is a tool that is designed to assist developers in the creation, development, testing, debugging, and deployment of Eclipse plug-ins.  The mandate of PDE also encompasses  tooling for the development of fragments, features, and update sites.

PDE is part of the Eclipse SDK and not a separately launched tool.  In line with the general Eclipse platform philosophy, PDE provides a wide variety of platform contributions (e.g. views, editors, wizards, launchers, etc.) that blend transparently with the rest of the Eclipse workbench, and assist the developer in every stage of plug-in development while working inside the Eclipse workbench.

Concepts

The Plug-ins view, which is part of the PDE perspective, will show the combined list of workspace and external plug-ins. In it, you will be able to browse the directory structure of external plug-ins, open files, etc.

Related concepts
Preparing the workbench
PDE concepts

Related tasks
Creating new plug-in project
Editing the manifest
Running
Deploying
Working with features
Working with update sites