How do I drive Eclipse from outside of Eclipse?

Question

I would like a few external tools to be able to monitor events within Eclipse and possibly launch events within it. For example, I would like to be able to monitor the progress of a workspace rebuild, and I would like to be able to launch an Eclipse run configuration.

Does Eclipse provide any sort of API for this?

Answer 1

You'll definitely need to write your own plugin. I suggest you start looking at these interfaces in the Eclipse API:

• Interface IProgressMonitor
• Interface ILaunchConfiguration