Eclipse Plug-in Development Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Time for action – animating the second hand

The second hand is drawn with a redraw on the Canvas, but this will need to be run periodically. If it is redrawn once per second, it can emulate a clock ticking.

Eclipse has a jobs plug-in, which would be just right for this task, but this will be covered in Chapter 4, Interacting with the User. So to begin with, a simple Thread will be used to issue the redraw.

1. Open the ClockView class.
2. Add the following at the bottom of the createPartControl method:

   Runnable redraw = () -> {
     while (!clock.isDisposed()) {
       clock.redraw();
       try {
         Thread.sleep(1000);
       } catch (InterruptedException e) {
         return;
       }
     }
   };
   new Thread(redraw, "TickTock").start();

3. Relaunch the test Eclipse instance, and open the Clock View.
4. Open the ...