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.
Then click on the desktop icon to get the following:
When we accept this we get the following 'welcome' project:
Setting up project
We start by creating a new project under New->Project
This takes us through a set of wizard pages, first we want to setup as a wizard:
On the next screen enter the project name, then set the JDK compliance, I did
this by clicking on 'Configure default':
Clicking on 'Configure default' gives the following screen, I set the compliance
level to 5.0
Clicking on 'Installed JREs' gives the following screen, but I did not need
to change anything on this page:
Clicking on OK takes us back to the wizard:
Clicking on next gives up a page which allows us to set 'Source', 'Projects',
'Libraries' and 'Order and Export' parameters. For now I have left these at
the default and set them later when the files are loaded.
Click on 'Finish' then close the 'welcome' project, we can then see the project
just setup:
I then copied the mjbWorld files into the workspace as shown here:
The mjbWorld files are availible from sourceforge
here.
I then right-clicked on 'mjbworld' in Package Explorer and clicked on refresh:
The program files are then shown in the Package Explorer window but when using
the 64bit version of Eclipse my system usually crashes with the following error
(full report),
I have therefore used the 32 bit version of eclipse for the following. I also
found that the Eclipse 3.1 seems more stable when run under java 1.4 so I start
Eclipse using the following command line:
/usr/share/eclipse/eclipse -vm /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.4.2-sun-1.4.2.08/jre/bin/java
This seems reasonably relible.
We now need to tell eclipse about the JOGL library. In the menu under the Project
-> Properties we can select 'Java Build Path' in the tree window and select
the 'Libraries' tab. We can then click on 'Add JARs':
select jogl.jar
Click on 'Native library location'
click on workspace
click on the location where jogl.dll is located, in this case resources.
We can also set the Default output folder so that the main directory does not
get cluttered.
If prompted we can click on 'yes' to move the existing outut:
Running the mjbWorld application
We can click on the down arrow to the right of the green arrow. Then select
Run As->Java Application
In this case select 'mjbWorld' and then click on 'OK'. The program should then
start.
This site may have errors. Don't use for critical systems.
