The Eclipse IDE

Eclipse is an open-source project that is primarily known for providing an IDE (integrated development environment) for Java called JDT (Java Development Tools). This allows you to develop Java applications in a graphical environment. The IDE includes an editor for writing your applications and a compiler and debugger for running them. You can see an animated demo of the Eclipse IDE for Java at http://www.eclipse.org/jdt/ui/screenCasts/JavaEditor_J2SE50.htm. You can download the Eclipse SDK, including the JDT, at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. The Eclipse SDK runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X, among other systems.

In order to use Eclipse, you will need to have the JDK from Sun already installed. The directory with java and javac must be in your path. You can test that it is in your path by trying to run java -version. On some systems, this directory may be in /usr/java.

When you first run the SDK, you will see an introduction, several tutorials, and some samples to help you learn how to use the Java IDE. For the most part, using the graphical environment for Java development is fairly intuitive, especially if you have used an IDE such as SlickEdit or Microsoft Visual Studio.