Chapter 8. The Eclipse Phenomenon


8. The Eclipse Phenomenon!

UP TO THIS POINT IN THE BOOK, we have been working on the command line (to run Ant and JUnit, for example). Working on the command line could be viewed as contrary to agile development by some. However, I'm a big believer that you need to understand the fundamentals firstin other words, what is happening underneath the covers. Furthermore, many developers prefer the command line and are highly effective working in this fashion, so I wanted to provide value to those developers as well. Now it is time to kick things into high gear by using the Eclipse SDK!

The Eclipse SDK is a useful and highly effective Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for programming in Java and so much more, as you will see shortly. Although the Eclipse SDK is quite robust in itself, what truly makes the Eclipse SDK so powerful is that it is also a platform with well-defined standards for developing plug-ins, small applications that run inside Eclipse. Hundreds of plug-ins are available for Eclipse. For example, at the time of this writing, a query on google.com for the words "eclipse" and "plug-in" resulted in millions of hits!

If you already use the Eclipse SDK or have used other products such as Mozilla Firefox browser (http://mozilla.com), you will appreciate the power of plug-ins. In my opinion, the plug-in paradigm is taking open source to a new level, primarily because an organization such as the Eclipse Foundation can put its muscle behind a platform. But the community as a whole completes and enhances the platform by adding to it (using plug-ins, for example).

In this chapter we will take a close at the Eclipse SDK and various plug-ins useful for rapid Java development.

This is a special chapter because I have learned so much more about Eclipse while researching for this chapter; in fact, my entire perspective on Eclipse has changed. I will share with you information about the history behind the Eclipse Foundation, the Eclipse platform, the enormous number of plug-ins, and how tremendously active the Eclipse community is. I hope by the end of this chapter, you will have one word to say about the Eclipse phenomenonwow!



Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
ISBN: 0672328968
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 219

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net