Once your working environment is clean and configured, you can start creating your first plug-in.
You start by creating a special plug-in project. PDE provides a wizard for setting up the project. You can access this wizard using File>New>Project... and selecting Plug-in Project in the list of wizards under 'Plug-in Development' category.
When you press Next, the first entry you will need to set is the project name. It is a convention that plug-in project names are the same as plug-in IDs, but they can be different. As an example, we will choose "com.example.xyz" for the project name.
The next page shows the initial structure of the plug-in project. If the project name conforms to the rules for plug-in names, you can keep the default. Otherwise, you will be asked to change it (See plug-in ids for a description of the format.). The Plug-in runtime library name will be used to define where the code of your new plug-in will be packaged once you are ready to publish it. The Source folder will be created to store your Java source inside the new project.
If you are creating a plug-in that is not meant to contain Java code, e.g. a documentation plug-in, select the 'Create a simple project' option and press Finish. PDE will create a simple project containing a plug-in.xml file with minimal content.
In the next page, you will need to choose what the content of your new plug-in is going to look like. If you choose a blank plug-in, only the plug-in project will be created. If you use the template wizards, the PDE will also create files such as the plug-in class, build properties, and plug-in manifest. Some of the templates provided by PDE also generate useful content such as views, editors, property pages etc. This content is generated by templates that can be combined into a wizard. All the available templates are individually selectable in the "Custom plug-in wizard".
In this example, we use the "Hello, World" template wizard. You can read about the wizard in the area to the right of the wizard list.
After the wizard has been selected, the following pages are under wizard's control. Each template wizard contributes a number of pages that customize the content about to be generated. However, all the templates share one common page. It will collect information about the plug-in, such as its name, version, and provider. It also provides options related to the plug-in class that will be generated. In this example, we will accept all the options.
After this page, templates add their own to collect template-specific information. Our "Hello, World" template has only one related to the action that will be contributed, as well as the message that will be shown in a message box.
When you press Finish, the wizard will create the new project, all the specified folders and files, and the initial Java build path. The build path is important for correct compilation of Java classes that are generated. The wizard will also open the plug-in manifest editor so that you can define additional attributes of your plug-in.
After the wizard is finished, the initial project structure should look like this: