About Eclipse
Eclipse is an open source IDE or tools platform.
IBM released its own source code into the project in 2001 and set up a consortium to run the project. In Febuary 2004 it became an independant not for profit corporation called the Eclipse Foundation.
It is written in Java but uses its own GUI framework SWT instead of Swing. It does allow users applications to be created with either SWT or Swing. SWT is uses native calls to the operating system instead of emulating the controls in the GUI library as Swing does. Also Swing uses the MVC Model View Controller model wheras SWT uses a more direct, lower level, API.
Eclipse consists of a general purpose platform which is very extendable by adding plugins. So it can be used as a Java development system, or C++, or PHP, or it could be anything else if you write the plugins for it.
Installing Eclipse
The install is very simple (in fact there is no install program as such) all we need to do is extract the files into the required directory, as follows:
- download the code for your platform (I am using eclipse-SDK-3.1-linux-gtk-x.86_64.tar.gz on this page but the other versions are very similar) from the eclipse site here.
- extract the 'eclipse' folder from this file into: /usr/share directory
- drag /usr/share/eclipse/eclipse to desktop and set to link
Notes:
- You need to have a java JDK already installed on your system (I suggest JDK5 or later) which you can get from Sun here.
- I suggest using eclipse version 3.1 at least because it has better support for native libraries and so it supports JOGL.
- I competely removed the previous 3.0 version of eclipse from my computer before doing this.
- For information about the configuration of my system see this page.
Installing Eclipse
Extracting eclipse directory from gz file to /usr/share/ directory
Starting Eclipse
Then click on the desktop icon to get the following:
When we accept this we get the following 'welcome' project:
