1.2 Getting Eclipse
How
do you get and install Eclipse? Eclipse is free for the
downloading—all you have to do is navigate to http://www.eclipse.org/downloads and select
one of the download mirrors available on that page. When you do,
you'll be presented with a list of the available
downloads, which are of these types:
- Release builds
-
The Eclipse
team releases these versions for general use. Usually when you
download Eclipse, you'll use one of the release
versions. These builds have been thoroughly tested, and the chance of
coming across serious bugs is minimal. This is a version of Eclipse
comparable to the version that other companies would sell—if
Eclipse were for sale.
- Stable builds
-
These are comparable to beta
versions. A stable build is a step along the way toward a release
version. The Eclipse team considers this build to be relatively
stable, but there may be problems. This is where
you'll find the new features that are upcoming in
Eclipse.
- Integration builds
-
These
builds are made up of components that have been fairly well tested,
but their operation with other components may still have some issues.
If things work out OK and the integration build proves itself, it may
be elevated to a stable version.
- Nightly builds
-
These are the
most experimental of all publicly available Eclipse builds.
They're created nightly by the Eclipse team, and
there's really no guarantee that things will work
well. Some experience with these builds indicates that they can
actually have substantial problems.
Normally,
you'll use the most recent release version of
Eclipse. To get Eclipse, select the most recent release download for
your operating system and click the appropriate link to download it.
Installing
Eclipse is not difficult—all you've got to do
is unzip or untar it, depending on your operating system. Since
you've downloaded the version of Eclipse targeted to
your operating system, you'll find the executable
file ready to run as soon as you uncompress Eclipse.
 |
Windows users will be pleased to learn that Eclipse
doesn't use the Windows registry, so
(re)installation is easy and trouble free.
|
|
You start Eclipse by running the Eclipse executable, such as
eclipse.exe. When you start the program the
first time, it may ask you to wait while it completes the
installation, which does not take long (Eclipse is creating the
workspace directories it'll be using). When you
first run Eclipse, you should see something like Figure 1-1, shown earlier in this chapter.
|
You must have Java installed on your machine when you try to start
Eclipse. If you start Eclipse for the first time and see a dialog box
with the message that begins "A Java Runtime
Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) must be available in
order to run Eclipse," you've got
to download and install Java first. You can get Java for free at
http://java.sun.com/j2se/.
In the next chapter, we'll see how to switch the
local installation of Java that Eclipse will use if you have multiple
installations of Java (for example, you might want to use a newly
downloaded JDK instead of the default JRE that comes with many
browsers).
|
|
To make starting Eclipse easier, you
can also connect various shortcuts to the Eclipse executable. In
Windows, right-click the executable file in the Windows Explorer and
select "Create Shortcut" from the
context menu that opens, then drag the new shortcut where you want
it. In Linux or Unix, just add the Eclipse directory to your path, or
use ln -s to create a symbolic
link to the Eclipse executable.
|
