Many companies have started adopting Eclipse as the default IDE for application development. In fact Eclipse has become so popular that the once popular Borland JBuilder and Weblogic Workshop have also been ported to use the Eclipse Platform.

With this there are more and more user getting introduced/started to/on Eclipse. At first the IDE might be confusing with features like “Build Automatically” etc. I have seen in many forums where users complain of not able to get started on using Eclipse for their day to day development activities.

The official Eclipse site should have been a place to find information; However its not, even after many revamps, I still feel that Eclipse.org is one of the most user un-friendly web site out there. There is more trouble when it comes to categorization/organization of content in the site.

The first thing I would recommend to any new Eclipse User is to use the Cheat Sheets ! When you start Eclipse, the Welcome page does have a link to the Cheat Sheets. (You can access the Welcome page via the Help Menu)

However not all the Cheat Sheets are displayed on the above welcome page. It only shows the Cheat Sheets which are part of the default Eclipse SDK. Many of Eclipse Projects like EMF etc contribute Cheat Sheets and this can be accessed via the Help Menu.

Cheat Sheets are a great way to get started on using a feature.

Note: If you are plug-in developer and want to build cheat sheets have a look at this article

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecl-cheatsheets/index.html

Following are the other places where you can find more information on Eclipse

• Eclipse Online Documentation – The same content can be viewed even from within Eclipse IDE (Help -> Help Contents). If the Help was available in PDF format, it would have been a nice add-on.
• Eclipse Articles
• Eclipse Newsgroups
• IBM Developer Works – There are some high quality Eclipse article on Developer Works
• EclipseCon – The Eclipse Conference is held every year and each year there are some high quality presentations delivered via various Eclipse Contributors and committers. Some or I should say most of the presentations are available to the public in PDF format. Dig through the sessions of EclipseCon 2007, EclipseCon 2006, EclipseCon 2005 and EclipseCon 2004

Where else can I go ?

There are lots of Blogs giving useful insight into Eclipse, few of which are written by Eclipse Committers. Few of them are listed on the sidebar of this page.

• Official Eclipse Blog
• Planet Eclipse is one site which covers the work and lives of Eclipse hackers and contributors.
• EclipseZone is another quality site providing useful Eclipse Tips and Tricks and articles on Eclipse features. The forum is also powerful in the sense that you get good responses to the problems/issues raised.
• Do keep a tab on Dzone as well for some good posts on Eclipse: http://www.dzone.com/links/tag/eclipse.html

If you use a RSS reader, I would recommend to add the RSS/Atom feeds of all the above sites. And last but not least, do subscribe to Eclipsetips.com feed as well

One of the notable things in this years Eclipse Release (Europa) is the way the Eclipse packages are released. In previous releases each project(WTP,DTP) had to be separately downloaded and installed.

For e.g. if you wanted a XML editor in Eclipse, you had to download and install the Web Tools Platform (WTP) package. With Europa there are set of 4 well defined packages targeted towards specific segment of developers.

Eclipse IDE for Java Developers

This package consists of the basic IDE with superior Java editing, incremental compilation, code assist etc. Also it includes the XML Editor (from WTP package).

The other packages included are:

• Base Platform
• JDT – Java Development Tooling
• CVS Client
• XML/XSD Editor
• Mylyn – Task Focused UI for Eclipse
• GEF
• EMF

Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers

This package is specially targeted for web developers. Many eclipse users are still not aware of Eclipse WTP project and hence I had encountered in many of the forums, where users complained of not being able to use Eclipse for Web Development.

Eclipse IDE for Java EE includes:

• Base Platform
• JDT
• Eclipse PDE – Plug-in Development Environment
• CVS Client
• Java IDE
• EMF
• GEF
• XML/XSD/HTML and JSP Editor
• Mylyn
• Datatools – Which help you quickly work with different DB’s.

Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers

If you are just interested in doing C/C++ development with Eclipse, you should download this package.

It includes

• Base Platform
• CDT – C/C++ Development Tooling
• CVS Client

Eclipse IDE for RCP/Plug-in Developers

This packages contains a complete set of tools for developers who want to create plug-ins and Rich Client Applications based on Eclipse.

It includes:

• Base Platform
• Eclipse SDK with complete source code
• EMF
• GEF
• Mylyn
• XML/XSD editor

If you do understand the different Eclipse packages, have a look at the official page detailing the different features in each Eclipse distribution.

I have been wanting to host a dedicated site to write posts on Eclipse. Till now I was using another weblog to write content on Eclipse and related plugins.

I have been trying to participate/contribute in the Orkut Eclipse forum, however its being filled with more spam and less of Eclipse these days. Its one of the primary reasons I intend to host a forum on this site which should help users to get started on using Eclipse as their primary development environment.

These are some of the popular posts from my other weblog.

1. History of Eclipse
2. Install Eclipse Plugins – The Easy Way
3. Comic Viewer – Eclipse Plugin written by Harish – Useful for reading comics from within Eclipse.
4. EclEmma – Java Code Coverage
5. Camel Case Search in Eclipse
6. Automated GUI Recorder
7. How To : Tail Files in Eclipse IDE
8. How To: Browse Remote Files in Eclipse IDE
9. Source Control in Eclipse IDE

You can expect more such similar posts in the coming days.Also if anybody is interested on writing about eclipse you can either drop a comment here or use the “Contact Us” page.