One main goal of Nomad PIM is to provide the same extendibility Eclipse provides for an IDE for a personal information management system. Therefore, it provides additional extension points that other plugins can use to extend Nomad PIM besides the standard RCP extension points. The resources listed on this page should help you extend Nomad PIM and customize it for your needs.

A good approach to start extending Nomad PIM is using the "Monkey see - Monkey do" rule (see "Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plugins", Gamma, Beck; 2003). You just copy a plugin similar to the one you want to create and start by changing and exploring it. If you have any questions regarding the code or architecture, please ask on the Developer Mailing List.

It is important to note that there is no stable API currently. Even though most of it will probably not change, there might and probably will be changes due to refactorings that will break your code.

General Development Resources

• Mailing Lists
• Version Control
• UML Diagrams
• Feature Plan
• Trackers
• Commit Rules

Tutorials

For all tutorials, some basic experience with writing Eclipse plugins is assumed, as well as java 5 and object-oriented software development experience.

1. Setting up Eclipse for Nomad PIM development
2. Creating and configuring a new Nomad PIM plugin project
3. Creating an entity type
4. Creating the basic entity UI
5. Extend an existing entity type

Code Snippets

The following code snippets are currently available:

1. Creating a task entity

Source Code Tours

Source code tours are simply tours to certain source code locations with some explaining comments. They require the TagSEA Eclipse plugin.

• Introduction to Code Tours

• Entities: A short tour to the main programming interfaces of the entity concept
• Filters: A short tour through the main filter classes, their connection to the entity concept and some predefined filters