Eclipse supports the concept of natures and builders. For each project you can register a nature for which you can associate a certain builder. A builder is an object that manipulates your resources in your Eclipse IDE and creates other resources.

For example the "Java Builder" is used to translate Java Source files into .class files. You can create your own builders by implementing the extension point "org.eclipse.core.resources.builders". Each builder is subclassed from "IncrementalProjectBuilder" and must implement the method build(). In case autobuild is active then this method is called from the eclipse Framework if resources are changed. The method is also called if the user selects "Clean", "Build" or "Build All" from the menu.

Builder are included in the file ".project" in the buildCommands tag. The method build() get a parameter if a full build (FULL_BUILD) or a delta build (INCREMENTAL_BUILD) has to be done. To get the changes in case of a delta build you can use the getDelta(getProject() call which returns a "IResourceDelta".

For more information on builders please see the article in the appendix.