What s Covered in This Chapter

What's Covered in This Chapter

In this chapter, we will take an in-depth look at Eclipse and how to leverage it for our sample application, Time Expression. By the time this chapter is complete, we will have shifted every single technology we have covered so far in this book into Eclipse, using a variety of free and sophisticated plug-ins. In this chapter we will learn about

• 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

Why SDK and Not IDE?

SDK (Software Development Kit) typically implies an API, whereas IDE (Integrated Development Environment) typically indicates a coding and debugging environment. The Eclipse documentation refers to its IDE as the Eclipse SDK (perhaps because it is also an API for developing plug-ins). However, it is perfectly okay to call it the Eclipse IDE; many people do.