Eclipse Standard Installation

Eclipse 3.2

With eclipse 3.2 a lot of new possibilities entered the way gaining a running standard eclipse installation within half an hour. In this article I focus on these major components:

• Eclipse Base SDK
• Callisto
• Subclipse

TODO (* Hibernate )

Therefore I don't fokus on the installation via your favorite distribution but through the native installation procedure into a local directory called simply eclipse or eclipse_VersionNumberwithin your home directory.

Why? If you like use your development environment on different plattforms (e.g. 64bit, 32bit, PPC), it is not possible to simply move your environment to an other computer. You have to install your eclipse installation from scratch on this particular machine - with all the plugins exactly the same concerning dependencies and versions.

If you don't do this, it is likely, that your developers - or yourself - will run into trouble when working with special sourcecode.

Prerequisites - Eclipse SDK

Assuming that you installed java before, download the eclipse service development kit (SDK) for your platform from Eclipse Downloads. Put it into your home directory (or elsewhere) and unzip or untar it.

Now you should be able to start your base eclipse installation.

Use Callisto or Yoxos for Plugins

Until here everything is, like before. But there is a good solution for getting all the various plugins installed without any trouble, working together from the scratch by using a new tool

• Callisto - the eclipse foundations version or
• Yoxos - the commercial one

The latter can be used for allmost every commercial and non-commercial plugin for eclipse. For this service you'll have to pay an annual fee to Innoopract - the firm behind yoxos. This is a very useful and timesaving tool for getting done with the various dependencies between the different eclipse plugins.

There is a free version of yoxos, that contains a lot of free eclipse projects. Check it out.

Callisto however only summarizes - until now - 10 eclipse projects - enough for most of the projects around.

Sublipse Plugin

Maintaining your projects via subversion? Then you can use

• Subclipse

for connecting eclipse to a subversion server.

It is always wise to store every project on the subversion server instead of managing different lokal installations of your projects!

My personally favorite method of gaining access to the svnserver is via ssh. The ssh connection only works with newer versions of subersion (greater 1.0.2). It uses the base authentification procedure of your system and needs no further configuration.

Open the svn perspective in eclipse and add a new location like this:

svn+ssh://username@servername_or_ip/directory/path/to/svn

Thereby you are addressing the svn directory on that server.

EPIC Perl Editor

For editing perl file with you can add the update site

http://e-p-i-c.sf.net/updates/testing

to you update manager an call it EPIC - Perl Editor

XSLT Editor

A good choice for an XSLT editor is the CPL licened one from Orangevolt.

The Update site:

http://eclipsexslt.sourceforge.net/update-site 

Call it e.g. Xslt Editor - Orangevolt.

Detailed informations and documentation you'll find on http://eclipsexslt.sourceforge.net/.

JFace

JFace is now a well integrated part in eclipse 3.2. You can easyly add a preconfigured SWT library to your project. Don't forget to switch the JFace support on.

The only thing you have to do now is to add a new library called OSGI to your project. Search the

eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.osgi_3.2.0.vJJJMMDD.jar

file and assign it to this variable. That's it.

All other manual activities necessary with eclipse <= 3.1 are not needed any more.

Velocity

The apache velocity project is a Java-based template engine:

"It permits anyone to use a simple yet powerful template language to reference objects defined in Java code. Velocity separates Java code from the web pages, making the web site more maintainable over its lifespan and providing a viable alternative to Java Server Pages (JSPs) or PHP."

The Veloedit is accessible as plugin for eclipse:

• http://veloedit.sourceforge.net/updates/

Poseidon

Make a directory links to your eclipse directory

mkdir eclipse/links

Edit a file called

eclipse/links/com.gentleware.poseidon.ide_integration.eclipse.link.txt 

with the following content path=/home/username/YourPoseidonInstallation/lib/poseidon

Restart eclipse. That's it.