Question

I am making a set of Eclipse Plugins for the Eclipse Workbench.

I want these Eclipse Plugins to communicate with each other through some shared
data structures/managers.

Is there some bootstrapping or other initialization process wherein I
can pass the shared domain objects through the constructor for the plugins(depepndency injection)?

What is the standard and best practice for achieving sharing of data across plugins?

Answer 1

Eclipse is OSGi based using the equinox runtime. OSGi manages all of the runtime dependencies you need.
The simplest way is to deploy your common code as a bundle (plugin). Export all of the packages you need to other plugins. (Export-Package header in manifest.mf)
In the plugins you need the package, declare them as imported packages (Import-Package in the manifest.mf file)

If you want to go the extra mile, expose the managers you need as services, and add service consumers in the plugins you need.

Here’s a simple tutorial to using services:
http://www.knopflerfish.org/osgi_service_tutorial.html