Develop > Presentation layer > Customize IBM Sales Center
Eclipse and plug-ins in the IBM Sales Center client
The IBM Sales Center client relies heavily on the use of the Eclipse platform. Eclipse is a platform that has been designed for building integrated web and application development tooling. The platform has become extremely popular based on what it supports and encourages: the rapid development of integrated features based on a plug-in model.
Eclipse provides a common user interface (UI) model for working with tools. Plug-ins can program to the Eclipse portable APIs and run unchanged on any of the supported operating systems. At the core of Eclipse is an architecture for dynamic discovery, loading, and running of plug-ins.
You can customize the IBM Sales Center by defining an extension in a customization plug-in and then using the system configurator to indicate that the application will use this new definition. Changes to the extensions in the XML files are read at startup and maintained in the Eclipse plug-in runtime registry.
Plug-ins package units of function called extensions. You can customize the IBM Sales Center by adding new extensions defined in customization plug-ins, by removing (suppressing) existing extensions, or by replacing existing extensions with new ones. Removal and replacement employ either Eclipse activities or the IBM Sales Center's system configurator, depending on the type of extension. See the detailed instructions in the IBM Sales Center extension point documentation and the Eclipse extension point documentation.
Key concepts in the Eclipse 3.0 Information Center
The Eclipse platform documentation, similar to WebSphere Commerce and IBM Sales Center documentation, is hosted online in an Eclipse information center, which allows browsing and searching on many topics related to Eclipse. You will be referring to the Eclipse 3.0 documentation. The links are provided to get you started, but the Eclipse project is a widely adopted initiative, with a wealth of information aboutline to support it.
See:
- The Platform Plug-in Developer guide, which contains information about developing with the many UI assets included in Eclipse
- The PDE guide, which covers how to organize and deploy the customizations
Introduction
- What is Eclipse?
Customization
- Extension point schema
- Extension point schema editor
- Platform architecture
- Runtime plug-in model
Deployment
- Features
- Features (in the PDE guide)
- Update sites (in the Platform Plug-in Developer guide)
Related concepts
IBM Sales Center development environment
Deploy customizations to the IBM Sales Center
User Interface Layouts in the IBM Sales Center
Related tasks
Plan a customization to the IBM Sales Center