During the past couple weeks, I ran across a few people and bugs that dealt with externalizing strings in PDE. For just about every issue that I came across, the problem could’ve been easily averted with some best practices around plug-in development.
The first best practice is to always remember to use the Externalize Strings wizard in PDE:
Let PDE and the wizard do the work for you:
The second best practice is to enable compiler settings around externalized strings for plug-in development (these are set to IGNORE by default):
When this compiler setting is enabled, you will get warnings around strings that need to be externalized or can’t be found in a properties file based on your Bundle-Localization MANIFEST.MF header.
With these plug-in development best practices, you should have no problems externalizing strings the proper way for your plug-in based applications.
Hope this helps.