Programming Tools: Eclipse 3.0.1

Eclipse has set a new standard in IDEs and component-based development. Most
of us get to know it as an IDE, but it can be much more. It also can be
used as the basis for developing applications. Other important
aspects of Eclipse are:

• It is one of the first major open-source packages developed mainly by
  a commercial entity. IBM started the project and continues to support
  it.
• The quality and the scope of Eclipse sets a new standard in
  programming environments and raises the expectations for other open-source
  packages. It will be tough to follow, especially for the normal
  one- or two-person developer teams found in the Open Source
  community.

Eclipse has been designed from the ground up to be a feature-based system. It's
design uses the idea of plug-in features as the aspects of what the
user sees. For a programmer, this means an IDE. For a normal business
user, this means applications that run on top of the Eclipse platform.

Eclipse's modular design is based on its feature sets. A feature set is
made up of one or more plugins. Plugins are made up of one or more code
components. Features are added to the Eclipse platform using either its
built-in installer or a more usual external installer.

Many systems and APIs provide many of the tools necessary to develop
applications or serve as programming tools. In the Open Source community,
Eclipse is the first to do it on a comprehensive scale. Perhaps, only
Microsoft's .NET concept on Windows comes close. The advantage of Eclipse
is it is platform-independent.

Eclipse is written in Java, but it does not come with a built-in Java
Runtime Environment (JRE). Thus, you need to have Java installed. To
work with Eclipse 3.0+, the JRE must be version 1.4 or higher.
Avoiding DLL Hell
Installing Eclipse is easy. Simply unzip the downloaded file and the
Eclipse system resides in the eclipse subdirectory.

Eclipse's update process puts each new version in its own
subdirectory. The subdirectory includes the version number in its
name. This allows multiple versions to be resident at the same time,
without cross-pollution among versions.

Eclipse's installer allows implementers to mark features as
optional. Users then can elect whether to include them in their Eclipse
environments. Such optional features can be installed later, if the
occasion calls for doing so.

Finally, Eclipse has a built-in update feature that you can run at any
time. You can use it to update both Eclipse and any of its feature sets.
Starting a Project
A useful set of wizards in the Eclipse package can create many project types. The
Help -> Cheat Sheet mechanism worked quite well for me. With it, I could create skeleton
Java applications, Java applets, plugins, CVS tasks and SWT applications.

As shown in the two screen snapshots below, Eclipse uses multipaned tabbed
windows. The views shown depend on the action being taken. For example,
the default view for files is an editor window is geared to the type of
file. For building Eclipse's form of a build file, a build view is shown.
Figure 1. Multipaned Tabbed ViewsFigure 2. A Build ViewAdaptability
Although Eclipse was written in Java and has a well-developed Java IDE,
I was curious to see how it would work with languages other than Java
and C++. A feature currently in beta testing, pydev, provides
a Python IDE within the Eclipse platform. Given the beta nature of pydev,
incorporating it into the Eclipse platform went quite well. I tested pydev
on some projects I am developing, and it worked adequately. In the future,
the promise of Eclipse and its rich set of features makes it a viable
contender for a Python IDE.
Pros and Cons
During my evaluation of Eclipse, I noticed both some problems and some
neat features. None of these are show stoppers, but you might as
well know what I ran into.

• The Help viewer did not allow me to change the font size. On my
  notebook, this made reading the help files difficult.
• The Help viewer did not tell me which files were being viewed. That is,
  I could not see the path names. This made it difficult to use alternative
  viewers. (See the previous point.)
• Tool tips often appeared to the right of the item over which the cursor
  was hovering. This made the tool tip unreadable when the item was at
  the right edge of the screen, because the tip was truncated and the cursor
  covered the rest; for example, the maximize button on the Help viewer.
• The default text editor did not support a word-wrap option. This meant
  I could not write this column using the default text editor. Also,
  I tried to define the default TXT editor as KDE's kate, but that had no
  effect. In fact, I could no longer edit any TXT file in the IDE. Opening
  an external file went into the bit bucket. I did recover, but it was
  a trip.
• The Search -> File facility was limited to workspaces. I needed to go
  to the command line to search for a string in any file.
• The Go Forward and Go Back on the Help viewer did not work as
  expected. I needed to click on the Content Tree to get to the next
  topic.
• When I started to create a new project, I found that the creation dialog
  box was modal, and I was unable to move around the Help system. The Help
  system should be independent of the modality of the rest of
  Eclipse.
• CVS currently is the only built-in source code
  control system.
• I found some missing help files for
  the SWT examples. Some of the Cheat Sheets were missing steps. Also,
  a only a limited number of Cheat Sheets are included.
• Icons on tabs are useful. For example, the left icon gives the file's
  full path when editing a text file. The right icon allows you to close
  that view.
• Use of tasks and markers are neat. Select any
  line in a resource, and you can create a task associated with that line or
  resource.
• The history log is a poor man's simple source code control system. It
  doesn't really replace CVS, but it is fine for a series of changes that
  you have saved but not yet checked into CVS.
• A rich set of build files and options are generated for the ANT
  build system.

Conclusion
Eclipse is a major new way of developing systems. It can serve as an IDE
for many popular languages and as a base for any application. However,
it is not as mature yet as many standalone IDEs geared to specific
languages, such as the offerings from Borland, Active State and, my
current favorite Python IDE, eric3. Even with these caveats, it might
be time to start thinking of migrating to Eclipse, especially if you
have some significant development efforts ahead.
Resources
Borland

Eclipse

eric3

Komodo

Reg. Charney has been a techie, an entrepreneur and businessman.
He also has been a long-time Linux enthusiast and now is developing a
series of business applications for Linux. His favorite language is
Python.