Transcript of talk: "Using Eclipse in KDE"

KDE Contributor and Developer Conference

Notes taken by: Jonathan Riddell (these are not official material)

More information on the talk can be found here

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, though Java is default in the download, so that everybody plays by the same rules.

Eclipse 3.0 is more responsive, and features a new look and feel, as well as rich client platform changes in the architecture.

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 now tutorials and code samples.

Wassim started up Eclipse, which first loads a graphical widget with four pictures to choose how you want to start, an improvement on previous versions of Eclipse that dropped you directly into the workbench/editor. Then he showed us a "cheatsheet", which is a built-in tutorial taking you through common tasks, 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 compilation in the background. There is an indexer which catalogues all the functions etc. and is also run the background, which allows the user to quickly jump around the code.

He seemed very impressed by 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 and UNIX-like systems). 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.