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| | Personal → Eclipse IDE | Rating: 0 | 17 Aug 10 at 19:03 |
When the total eclipse throws the planet into darkness...
No, no - I love "Heroes" TV series too, but today we talk about another eclipse. I can't say why Eclipse Foundation chose exactly this name. But it doesn't matter. It is tmportant that in November 2001, Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, and SuSE founded a corporate consortium named Eclipse, and later, in early 2004, they reorganized it into a nonprofit organization - Eclipse Foundation.
Now Eclipse has become one of the most popular IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for software development in almost every conceivable programming languages, and not only for this.
In the basement it is a free, open-source, cross-platform framework, which can be extended with many plug-ins. Eclipse runs on Java, so download and install it before your experiments. Otherwise you'll get a strong reject:
Eclipse can be downloaded from the official site - eclipse.org.
The are many versions available on the download page:
I chose the version for C/C++, because it is the "lightest" one, just as well as it is possible to add a Perl plugin. By the way, screenshots here and here are made with Eclipse.
Creators of this IDE decided to reject a classic installer - the program is distributed in a simple archive and it is ready to work immediately after unpacking. But it's not so easy - we have only the development environment and language compilers must be installed separately.
To create programs in C and C++ in Eclipse I use (which is not surprising) GCC toolkit. More specifically, in this case, the Windows port of GCC - MinGW.
It is delivered in an installer-downloader form, which represents a configuration program, which asks what components are needed before installation and it downloads only them.
It is located at the official SourceForge page:
By the way, you can just download some components without installation:
And here is the promised components list:
Downloading and installation will not take a lot of time - MinGW in this configuration downloads only 20 megabytes.
So, Java is installed, MinGW is installed too, Eclipse is unzipped. Now we can finally run it.
Like any huge Java application, Eclipse starts a long time. The Eclipse launch time can be compared with such a monster, like OpenOffice.org.
After the first launch you are asked about the path to a workspace directory:
You can check the option to make this question not asked at the next start.
After start Eclipse looks like any other IDE - the project explorer on the left side, the text editor in the middle, and the console in the bottom:
To create a new project we will use the wizard:
For the first time it is convenient to use the simple "Hello World!" template:
Eclipse will generate the hierarchy of the project, also it will create necessary files and fill them with needed text. Well, then it shows us our first (or not first) source code:
Compile it immediately:
And then run, if there are no errors we see the classic greeting in the console:
Now let's extend Eclipse with a Perl addon. We use EPIC plugin for this - Eclipse Perl Integration. Its homepage - http://www.epic-ide.org/. But before this, do not forget to install Perl itself.
Go to SourceForge site for the plug-in's newest version:
As you can see, this is also a simple zip archive. Unzip it somewhere and get back to Eclipse. In the Help menu, select Install New Software:
In the appeared dialog we click "Add" and then "Local":
Specify the directory in which we extracted the plug-in. Then plug-in components will be available for installation. Select them all and click "Next":
Installation is started...
...during it you will be warned about use of the unsigned content:
We confirm our desire to install the plug-in for Perl development. After installation is complete, we are asked to restart Eclipse:
Let's do it. So now a Perl project will be added to the list of all available types of projects:
And the syntax highlighting tool and the convenient tool for code formatting will appear in the editor too:
What else can I say? It's very easy to go through the study of multiple programming languages using the same IDE - controls on the usual places, familiar settings, expected bugs 
To summarize, I love Eclepse for an infinite number of plug-ins for every conceivable task. And because it is cross-platform. And I don't love it for slowness (damn Java!) and some bugs with installing plug-ins which inconsistent with current Eclipse's version.
Dmytro Krasylnikov
"Design and Test Lab", Ltd. 2010
/specially for www.av-school.com/ | | Tag: eclipse, IDE, programming, c++, perl |
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