Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the following:

• The Eclipse Foundation

• The Eclipse platform and projects

• Eclipse SDK concepts

• Installing Eclipse

• Setting up Eclipse for Time Expression

• The Java Development Tools (JDT) plug-in

• Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (for Tomcat support, JSP editing, and other JEE support)

• Using Eclipse for Time Expression (starting Tomcat and connecting to HSQLDB, for example)

• Eclipse team support using CVS

• Plug-in directories for both free and commercial plug-ins

• Eclipse tips and tricks

• Results of a 30-minute comparison to IntelliJ and NetBeans

In this chapter, we covered a lot of material about Eclipse. However, we aren't done with Eclipse just yet. In the next chapter, I will show you how to leverage Eclipse's debugging features. However, even then, we will have covered only a subset of the Eclipse SDK and the third-party plug-in market. For example, we will not be covering topics such as the UML2 project or even more importantly, the Visual Editor framework, which according to the eclipse.org website is a "vendor-neutral, open development platform supplying frameworks for creating GUI builders, and exemplary, extensible tool implementations for Swing/JFC and SWT/RCP." Swing and SWT, as you know, provide the capability to develop sophisticated GUI (thick client) applications. If what we have seen in this chapter is any indication of how powerful Eclipse is for web application development, you can only imagine how good the plug-ins for developing thick applications will be.

So much is going on in the Eclipse community that it is almost impossible to conceive of what types of products will come out of this rapidly growing community.