Debugging Eclipse plug-ins

Question

This is my first attempt at creating an Eclipse plug-in. I\'ve created one, along with a feature and update site. I set the target platform as my local Eclipse installation.

Answer 1

Now I'm confused as to why the same plug-in is behaving differently in the production environment, as against the dev environment and when I was debugging it from my IDE. The target platform in both cases is the same eclipse version. What could be the reasons?

This is a classic: Eclipse plugins and RCP applications do indeed behave differently between PDT (the Eclipse IDE) and the exported product.

In your case, a NullPointerException thrown from the exported version but not from Eclipse is 9 times out of 10 an image or other resource files (properties, etc.) that is loaded by your code but is not listed in the build.properties of your plugin.

Anyway, you'll need to check the logs to retrieve the stacktrace and hunt down its cause. Such logs could be found in your friend's workspace under le .metadata/.log file