Eclipse – Integrated Development Environment

Today I will share my personal know-how of a great tool that every developer must have used and many automation tester should-have used. This is an Integrated Development Environment and is a very likely known tool among-st the IT world.

For development purposes, we can use Eclipse. It comes in exotic flavors, depending on the requirement you can opt for any.

TIP: Always go with the flow, i.e. always take the latest and most stable version of the open-source tool.

Gone with the days, where we use to type all programs on Notepad and try executing it with the compiler-first and then executor. Here comes the most adopted and highly recommended tool for project development. Not only small-size projects but also Enterprise Edition, Standard Editions, Mobile Edition type projects.

Eclipse is a well-to-do Integrated Development Environment that can be used for Java, groovy, grails, and much-more development. You can pick one that suits your desires from a whole lot of list available here.

How to start working with Eclipse IDE?

All you need to do is, to just download a version of eclipse(I am using Eclipse JUNOS for JAVA development and automation framework).

Once you are done with this, you need to run this EXE on your local machine, and you will get a chance to make your hands dirty with this 😀

Now, as a requirement comes, you can customize your work.

How to make a new project in Eclipse?

Open eclipse.
Make a work-space where-in you will save all your further consignments.
Now, go to File–> New –> “Your Favourite Programming Language” Project.

And you are ready for coding.

How to import project in Eclipse?

Open eclipse.
Make a work-space where-in you will save all your further consignments.
Now, go to File–> Import –> Existing Project into the workspace.
Also you can filter text by typing the text in the given search bar.

And you are done.

Another beautiful feature that Eclipse provides is plug-in addition. You can add your favorite plug-ins in eclipse and then you can integrate them with your existing/new project.

There are different advantageous plugins for Eclipse, some of them are :

Maven Plug-in Links wherein you can get this plug-in from: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/ and http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/
POM editor
Run and debug maven goals from Eclipse
Configure the Eclipse project from a pom.xml
Checkstyle – Plugin. Links wherein you can get this plug-in from http://eclipse-cs.sourceforge.net/update.
SVN – Plugin. Links wherein you can get this plug-in from http://download.eclipse.org/technology/subversive/0.7/update-site/ http://www.polarion.org/projects/subversive/download/eclipse/2.0/update-site/
TestNG – Plugin
JUnit – Plugin

How to install plug-ins in Eclipse IDE?

Open eclipse.
Make a work-space where-in you will save all your further consignments.
Now, go to Help –> Eclipse Marketplace –> here start typing the name of the plug-in you want to install.

Disclaimer Eclipse provides some extra files while making projects, It is always recommended not to commit Eclipse configuration files (like .project, .project and .settings/ to any central repository where you are keeping your code), Instead you can always generate them from Maven according to your own local configurations and locations.

How to change look-and-feel in Eclipse IDE? 🙂

It is always a personal choice to work in the environment which you like. Not only professional ambiance but also the personal surroundings. Same features Eclipse provides to us, where-in we can change the font, size, coloring, etc of the workspace. Let’s see how.