Tips on Eclipse IDE and Eclipse Plugins

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 ...

An important facet of designing a program for use in different countries is the localization, or externalization, of text that is displayed by the program.

By externalizing strings, the text can be translated for different countries and languages without rebuilding the Java program.

The ResourceBundle Class in Java helps you to accomplish the above task.

Resource bundles contain locale-specific objects. When your program needs a locale-specific resource, a String for example, your program can load it from the resource bundle that is appropriate for the current user's locale.

In this way, you can write program code that is largely independent of the user's locale isolating most, if not all, of the locale-specific information in resource bundles.

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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 ...

There are times when you need to restart Eclipse (other than the obvious reasons) If you are running the IDE for days together, the IDE does become sluggish. A quick look at the memory occupied by Eclipse also is an indication to restart Eclipse If you install new plugins when the IDE is active/open, the new plugin functionality is not activated until you restart Eclipse. The normal way to restart is to close the IDE (saving the workspace) and again run Eclipse.exe. If you have a shortcut, it would definitely help you to start Eclipse quickly. However there is another easy way to restart Eclipse: File -> Switch Perspective -> Choose your Current Workspace If you use more ...

Eclipse Plugins show the true power of Eclipse extensible architecture. You can add new functionality to the IDE by extending the extension points contributed by the base plugins.

Here are some of the sites where you could search for Eclipse Plugins

Eclipse.orgEclipse.org has long list of committed projects which add on new dimensions to the functionality of Eclipse. Other than this, there are a host of Technology Projects (incubation projects), few of which are finally converted to a committed project based on the popularity and other factors.  Eclipse-Plugins.2y.netEven though the domain name is kind of weird, this site is one of the first places to organize the different eclipse plugins ...

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. History of Eclipse Install Eclipse Plugins - The Easy ...