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This is the book I wanted to read when I started using Eclipse three years ago. The book didn't exist—until now. It's different from other books that assume you know nothing, but it does not leave you hanging if subjects such as JUnit or CVS are unfamiliar. If you are experienced in Java development or are already working with Eclipse, you'll still benefit from a clear description and examples that can turn you into a power user. This book distills the extensive features and preference settings so that Eclipse becomes the indispensable tool it has become for me.
The topics presented in Eclipse Distilled are essential knowledge for anyone using Eclipse to develop Java applications, whether you are creating new plug-ins that extend Eclipse or building and testing enterprise applications. Other books have been written about developing new plug-in contributions for Eclipse (see references at the end of Chapter 1). This book is about using Eclipse. In it, we work on an order management and product catalog application while learning Eclipse.
Many project teams are striving to become more agile by following an iterative development process and accommodating new or changing requirements throughout the lifecycle. Your team may be following a specific methodology, such as Extreme Programming (XP), or customizing a set of agile development practices suited to your organization's culture and project requirements. Successful agile development requires a combination of management practices and software development practices. This book describes specific capabilities that are designed into Eclipse to support agile development while writing, building, and testing your code.
This book is based on my personal experiences and those of others around me while using Eclipse to build production code. I've monitored the Eclipse newsgroups for three years, and I've included answers to common questions and misunderstandings in this book. While distilling these topics I tried to convey a deeper insight into how Eclipse works and how you can use it in the most productive way.
You will benefit from Eclipse Distilled if
You are developing any kind of Java application and are either new to Java or already an expert. You'll step through wizards while creating and running your first Java project and use the advanced capabilities while debugging, unit testing, and more.
You are creating new plug-ins for Eclipse and need a deeper understanding about how Eclipse works and how it is used for professional development. The most successful plug-ins fit seamlessly into the natural flow of activities performed by Eclipse users.
You are applying agile development practices or would like to do so. Even if you are part of a traditional, non-agile project team, you can still benefit from applying unit testing, refactoring, and continuous integration to your deliverables.
You really don't care about methodology but want expertise in Eclipse that only comes from a deeper understanding of how it was intended to be used.
You are a college student using Eclipse for a class project. Having access to an open source development tool with these capabilities allows more complete, realistic assignments and team projects, and it prepares you for quick transition into your first job.Roadmap for this Book
Eclipse Distilled is organized into two parts to help you find answers quickly, whether you are new to Eclipse or an experienced user looking for deeper insight. This book is written so that the chapters can be read in sequence, but you can also jump ahead to specialized topics in Part 2 and return to any chapter for future reference.Part 1: Getting Started
These first seven chapters give you a solid understanding of how the Eclipse IDE is organized and how it works. The explanation is not simply a series of screen images; we methodically step through the details of organizing your workspaces and projects, customizing your perspectives and views, and leveraging the Java editor for rapid development and code navigation. You will learn how to debug local and remote Java applications by stepping through multi-threaded execution, displaying and changing variable values, exploring object structures, and evaluating code snippets in the context of a suspended thread.
New users should study Part 1 carefully to understand how the Eclipse IDE is organized and how to configure Java projects and gain optimal use of the editor's features. Eclipse often has several ways to accomplish a task. The choice among these alternatives is sometimes based on personal work preferences, and at other times it is guided by the structure and complexity of your projects. I don't attempt to list all possible alternatives, but instead I present an approach based on common practice in Eclipse and describe alternatives in some cases.
Experienced Eclipse users may still find useful insight within Part 1, or they may proceed directly to Part 2.Part 2: Getting Agile
Eclipse itself was created using an agile development process and includes features that add agility to any development effort. The rest of us benefit from the fact that creators of Eclipse have added tools to make their own lives easier and more productive.
Chapter 8 introduces the principals of agile development and its use of iterative development cycles. Each remaining chapter in this section focuses on one aspect of agile development and how to accomplish it within the Eclipse IDE. You could read these chapters in any order or jump straight into one of these chapters before finishing Part 1. For example, if you are joining an established project team, you may not create your own Java project from scratch. Instead, you'll check out projects from a repository such as CVS. In that case, you should read through Chapter 13 earlier in your study. Other chapters in Part 2 cover continuous testing with JUnit, refactoring, continuous integration with Ant, and coding standards.
Chapter 9 explains how to enhance the Eclipse workbench with new or updated plug-ins. The integrated Update Manager allows you to search local or remote sites for compatible plug-ins, schedule automatic updates, and manage your workbench configuration. Several hundred plug-in contributions are available, and the rate of new plug-in creation is accelerating.The Road Ahead
In February 2004 the Eclipse community was reorganized into a not-for-profit corporation named the Eclipse Foundation. The initial open source contribution came from IBM in November 2001. Its future is now governed by an independent body whose charter is to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services. All technology and source code provided to this fast-growing ecosystem will remain openly available and royalty-free.
Eclipse continues to grow in breadth and depth, moving faster than most people expected for an open source community project. Many open source contributions are under development, as are many commercial products that build on the foundation provided by this platform. It's getting harder to answer the question, "What is Eclipse?" But there's no doubt that the road ahead will be fast and exciting.Conventions Used in this Book
The following formatting conventions are used throughout the book:
Bold—Used for the names of UI elements such as menus, buttons, field labels, tabs, and window titles.
Italic—Used for emphasizing new terms and web URLs.
Courier—Used for code examples, references to class and method names, and filenames.
Courier Bold—Used to emphasize code elements.
"Quoted text"—Used for text to be entered by the user.
© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
FROM OUR EDITORS
The Barnes & Noble Review
The Eclipse folks call their baby a ﾽuniversal tool platform -- an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular.ﾽ All well and good, but many folks want to use Eclipse for one reason: to write great Java software. Thatﾽs what David Carlsonﾽs Eclipse Distilled is about: nothing more, and nothing less.
Carlsonﾽs been using Eclipse since its early IBM days. This book draws on that experience, plus his conversations with hundreds of working Eclipse developers. He offers realistic, best-practice guidance for organizing any project, large or small. He shows how to make the most of Eclipseﾽs Java editor to code more efficiently. He even walks through using Eclipse to support agile development. All that in less than 300 pages -- so you can spend more time working in Eclipse than reading about it.
Part I focuses on Eclipseﾽs core tools for Java development. Youﾽll install Eclipse, create and configure new projects, manage workspaces, customize your Workbench, master basic debugging. Eclipse offers multiple ways to perform the same task; Carlson tells you whatﾽs working best for him and his many colleagues. In a detailed chapter on rapid development, Carlson covers Eclipseﾽs navigation shortcuts, Content Assist, code templates, Quick automated error correction, and more.
Eclipse fits agile methodologies especially well. In Part II, Carlson shows how to use Eclipse to support self-adaptive processes, continuous testing, refactoring, continuous integration with Ant, collective ownership utilizing CVS, even coding standards. Where you need to add plug-ins, Carlson tells you where to find them and how to configure them.
Agile or otherwise, Eclipse is becoming a great Java IDE. And this is a great book for anyone who wants to use it that way. Bill Camarda, from the April 2005 Read Only
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Organized for rapid access, focused on productivity, Eclipse Distilled brings together all the answers you need to make the most of today's most powerful Java development environment. David Carlson introduces proven best practices for working with Eclipse, and shows exactly how to integrate Eclipse into any Agile development process. By focusing on need-to-know information and providing best practices and methodologies, this book is designed to get you working with Eclipse quickly. Whether you're building enterprise systems, Eclipse plug-ins, or anything else, this concise book will help you write better code - and do it faster.
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