/[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Community+World+Summit|aKademy] / [http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+@+aKademy|Talks] / Eclipse

-=Eclipse 3.0=-

By Wassim Malhem, Eclipse PDE Committer

3.0 is more responsive, New Look and Feel, rich client platform changes in the architecture.

Eclipse is an open [designed to allow easy extension by 3rd parties] platform [designed to be extended] (IDE) [provides tooling to manage workspaces and build, launch, debug applications] for anything [but nothing in particular].  Eclipse has no bias towards any tooling (Java is default in the download), everybody plays by the same rules.

There are so many plugins (over 1000 for a typical install) that they had to introduce a welcome screen to walk people through startup and the concept of capabilities where plugins are grouped and turned on or off.

To support users there are tutorials and code samples.

He then started up Eclipse.  It starts into a graphical widget with four pictures to choose how you want to start, previous versions of eclipse dropped you directly into the workbench/editor.  Then he showed us a "cheatsheet" which is a built in tutorial taking you through e.g. creating a Java plugin.  He showed us turning off a capability which prevents plugins from showing up in the menus.

Responsiveness has been improved by running operations such as compile in the background.  There is an indexer which catalogues all the functions etc and is also run the background, it allows to quickly jump around the code.

He seemed very impressed with the ability to move frames around within the Eclipse window which shows that SWT is a serious widget toolkit.  Then he showed us Eclipse with a Java Swing plugin.  It also has an HTML plugin (uses Mozilla on Unix).  He showed us an Eclipse application which wasn't an IDE but had a calendar and HTML widget demonstrating what a flexible framework Eclipse can be.