Yes your contribution to the ecf are welcome always and thanks for your interest towards ECF. so since you want to head start with eclipse tooling i would like to share few things that i found when i was working with this projects.if you interested about eclipse based tooling you better go through these[1]-[14] tutorials because they really helped me to understand this topic. understanding about OSGI modularity[1] and also OSGI services[2] will help you to get your hands onto OSGI remote services. then get to know about OSGI remote service Developer workflow[3][4] is very important as well. so next one little be little bit hard caz i merely found tutorials regarding this which is eclipse tooling so i suggest you to go through this links to understand about eclipse plugins[6] and ui tools this will help you somewhat.. but for the rest of other steps you should refer eclipse core code base and ECF code base[15].and also i found many useful links i will send you those while you working(hard go through my browsing history).And there are some especial tutorial slides with ECF source repo they might help you to understand about ECF as well.
thanks,
Regards,
Sakith.