100 Eclipse

You'll have to make your own choice about which is the best development environment for you. Old-timers like me will never give up their text editors and command shells and scripts, but we'd be fools not to learn the new tools, too. (Of course, the converse is also true.)

Last week we worked with NetBeans, an IDE produced by Sun, the producers of Java. Today we work with an IDE that's substantially more popular in industry, Eclipse, which was developed by IBM and a few years later donated to the open-source world.

1. See if there's already an Eclipse directory on your machine. It's probably in C:\eclipse. Since it's all Java and not integrated into the Windows registry, it's safe simply to delete the directory and start over.
   
   
2. Go to eclipse.org and look around. Find and get the download labeled Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (85 MB). Install it.
   
   
3. Go through both the Hello, World and Hello, World SWT tutorials. Check out the directory structures.
   
   
4. Scan the article "SWT, Swing or AWT: Which is right for you?" at IBM's developerWorks. Take some time while you're there to check out a few other topics that interest you.
   
   
5. Now for a GUI for Eclipse: I recommend Jigloo. You can install it manually by unzipping it into your Eclipse plug-ins directory or by using Eclipse's Software Updates facility on the Help menu. I find the latter more cumbersome, but still interesting.
   
   
6. Jigloo can handle both Swing and SWT: clever Jigloo! Do the Jigloo Swing tutorial.
   
   
7. In the time that's left, can you reproduce one of the sliders from last week? Or some dots? Or something more profound? Amaze us all.

There's an interesting reference to an article comparing Eclipse and NetBeans here.