Eclipse Plug-in for Safari Books Online

Taking developer productivity to the next level

Eclipse is an open source platform for building Integrated Development Environments (IDE) to create applications as diverse as web sites, embedded Java programs, C++ programs, and Enterprise JavaBeans. With its rich feature set and extensibility, Eclipse is fast becoming the choice IDE for developers worldwide.

Safari Books Online is the home of Safari Bookshelf - the service that offers programmers and IT professionals instant access to the full text of thousands of leading technology books right at their desktops. Two of the best-known technology publishers in the business -- O'Reilly Media Inc. and The Pearson Technology Group - have joined forces to create Safari Books Online. The Safari repository is based on XML and the architecture has been extended with a strong XML API set. This API set will help developers across the world to create new applications and service offerings as well as integrate them into other applications.

Safari JV and CIGNEX Technologies, Inc partnered to create an Eclipse Plug-in that will allow Eclipse users to search safari content within the Eclipse environment. Safari Search Plug-in currently works with Eclipse version 2.1.3. You can download eclipse 2.1.3 at http://download2.eclipse.org/downloads/drops/R-2.1.3-200403101828/index.php

With this plug-in in place, developers can now search the Safari e-reference library from within the Eclipse environment. Let's take an example: A developer is working on a J2EE project and is interested in searching information related to "Threading" in Java. Now, without leaving the IDE, developer can type in the keywords in the Safari search window and execute a search on the Safari library. The developer can browse through the search results and also drill down into a particular search result to view more details. Once convinced that he/she has identified the right information, he/she can navigate to the Safari portal to access the premium content.

Key features of the Safari search plug-in are:

Full text search
Search based on filters such as:

Relevance ranking of search results
Preview of content(subset of what's available at Safari)
Browse capability for search results
Ability to specify sorting of search results

Download 1.0

Please download the safari search plug-in and the associated documentation from the following links:

1. Safari Search Plug in

2. Technical Documentation

3. User Guide