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Monday, August 01, 2005 13:29 // USA, Portland // href
taught by Bill Dudney
About Eclipse
Eclipse is a rich-client-platform (rcp) that gives you a lot of functionality for building rich clients, this means that a lot of functionality is contained in the client. Eclips itself is such a "client".
Currently there are about 100 companies who donate resources to eclipse development.
The main focus of Eclipse is still Java, but there is a growing number of plugins for using Eclipse to write code in other languages.
Eclipse consists of 1000s of tools. A perspective is Eclipses way of only showing the tools required to do the task at hand. Eg the Java perspective only shows the tools relevant for Java development.
The Java editor is aware of the Java language and has lots of java specific functions like context help and command completion. It can even help to fix bugs by suggesting fixes to common errors.
Eclipse is fully integrated with JUnit. It can automatically generate JUnit test skeletons for any class you select. The Eclipse Java editor has lots of functions fo code generation. At the touch of a button it can generate all that fluffy code that does not do anything and still has to be repeated many times. (Ruby solves this problem with its META programming functionality in the language itself.)
Eclipse can deal with Ant (the java make alternative) files, but internally Eclipse has its own build system, so it does not keep Ant files in sync. NetBeans on the other hand, uses Ant internally as its build system so if you are into Ants, you may want to look an NetBeans.
Debugging Java with Eclipse
Eclipse can remote debug java applications. With this it is possible to fully separate the application from the eclipse environment. This comes especially handy with big java apps like Tomcat. Use options -Xdebug and -Xrunjdwp: to start the application with remote debugging hooks enabled (this is a special function of the Sun JDK, so it will only work when running with the Sun JVM.
The Eclipse debugger can be enhanced with custom java code (toString methods) to teach it how to represent custom types when printing variables.
J2EE development with Eclipse
If you are doing web application development you should get WTP (Web Tools Project) which provides full J2EE integration for Eclipse.
Installing WTP: First get GEF (Graph Editor Framework), EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and Visual Editor Project and only then you can install WTP successfully.
Content © by Tobias Oetiker