Eclipse Ide

Download: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/index.php

Wiki: http://eclipsewiki.swiki.net (on the SwikiFarm)

• Strong refactoring support
  • Variables and Classes up and down their respective hierarchies (local to field, anonymous to local, local to top-level)
  • Renaming of anything, with or without updating references, javadoc and string literals (useful for reflection)
  • Extracting methods (passes RefactoringBenchmarksForExtractMethod)
  • Extract Interface
  • Option previews for all refactorings
• Did I mention code completions?
  • Context sensitive method, class and variables suggestions (i.e., will only show methods returning List subclasses if in a assignment to a List variable)
  • Variable guessing for all completions
  • Editable templates, with access to variable guessing
  • Create method, variable or class
• Useful support for anonymous and nested classes.
• Support for Junit
• Formatting
• Remappable key bindings
• Ant builds, as well as builtin incremental builds.
• Complete cvs integration, and there are several third party plugins supporting other versioning systems
• Lots more built in, and anything that isn't built in can be created as a plugin (i.e., realtime code metric analysers that give notice through the same mechanisms as the built-in plugins, alternate editors, compilers, Gui designers, round-trip graphical models, alternate code completers, etc...)

The Eclipse Platform is an open framework and toolkit for building IDE's (just like Mozilla isn't a web browser but a web platform). Eclipse itself consists of a set of core technologies (a windowing API that works the same on Linux and Windows and a few other useful bits and pieces) a core Java Development Toolkit, and what is called the Plugin Development Kit. You can build "plugins" in either Java or other technologies (integration with ActiveX and COM is included) which can interact with each other through standard, published ExtensionPoints. It is the foundation for IBM's new commercial IDE, known as WebSphereStudioApplicationDeveloper.

Eclipse is open source under the CommonPublicLicense version 0.5 (as of November 8, 2001).

The core philosophy behind Eclipse is "Everything is a plugin," as inspired by VisualStudio.

it is an open framework and toolkit for building IDE's

It don't think it's only useful for building IDEs. You can take out all IDE-ish parts, as they're only plugins, and have a complete application framework for complex tasks. The extension point strategy is very concise and expressive. I had my first plugin running in minutes. -- ManuelSimoni

-- DafyddRees

Dafydd, I also had this problem when I grabbed the latest version of Eclipse. Its because Eclipse doesn't ship with a JRE but the launcher is a win exe that hangs if Eclipse doesn't start (they really should sort that). You can download a 1.3.x runtime from the Eclipse website or use another JDK if you use the appropriate command line arguments. ChanningWalton

Problem fixed - I posted the details on the eclipse newsgroup. Within a day, I had the answer: install a more recent version of the Java 2 SDK. That fixed the problem. This is a great IDE - it only took a few hours to get productive and I even have enough memory left over do useful things. --DafyddRees

A general way to debug startup errors is to run eclipse from the command line (in the eclipse directory) with java -cp startup.jar org.eclipse.core.launcher.Main

This method reported to me that a certain dll did not have the proper permissions (Windows 2000) -- Mark Miller

We use Eclipse for our every-day development. Importing our existing code was no problem (several thousand classes). It works allright, though we had to drop the spectacular integration with CVS (no, it is really great) because of performance problems. (you might want to check a recent build, they've been making improvements :) )

We're quite happy with it, it is usefull and the price is right ;-). I hope to see a MacOsx version soon.

--AlexVanDenBergh

The MacOsx port is available now. --ChanningWalton

-- WilliamUnderwood

Here is a link to the Editor Enhancements package: http://lunar-eclipse.sourceforge.net/

May be a stupid question: is there a smalltalk plugin for eclipse?

I don't think the question is stupid, as there are plugins for a whole number of languages, but the answer seems to be "no" at the moment.

At OOPSLA this year, there was a presentation on Eclipse. There, some guys (from IBM, I believe) gave a short demo of their eclipse-smalltalk work. It wasn't prime time, but they demonstrated that they were able to write and run a tiny smalltalk program using eclipse. The downside is that they were using a proprietary smalltalk component instead of an open one, like SqueakSmalltalk. --EricHerman

It's there, but it's hard to find. Do a global find (Ctrl-H); then, in the search results window, you'll see "Replace" in the context menu (right-click).

Otherwise, depending on what you are trying to do, one of the refactoring functions which will make the changes in a semantically meaningful way might work for you. Refactor->Rename...

3.0 stream adds regex in replacements (search regex have been available for some time, but the ability to use matches in the replacement is fairly recent).

A. It is a missing feature. See http://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=19602#c2

Not to be whiny, but WHY are they still putting this feature off? Most of us probably work in environments where we do code reviews, and line numbers are pretty essential, aren't they?

A. Yes, you can. In the Java perspective, package explorer window, click the Menu arrow and select "Filters...". You can do the same in the Resource perspective's Navigator view. Is there some other view in Eclipse where the folders show up that you'd like them to be hidden?

A. Yes, you can keep it external (since the 3.0 stream).

A. Yes, just refresh the directory where you edited the code so that Eclipse knows that it has changed. The latest versions can detect changes automatically, although I'm not sure it will trigger a rebuild.

This page mirrored in WikiPagesAboutRefactoring as of July 17, 2004