Eclipse

What is Eclipse?

Eclipse is an awesome IDE for creating apps, in various languages. It has a GTK+ UI that is much more accesible to regular programmers from a Windows environment than the tools traditionally used by GNOME hackers.

It is currently best for developing apps in Java, but support for C, C++, C# and Python is rapidly catching up.

It was originally a (very) large body of code that IBM open-sourced. There is now a large community of companies and developers using and extending Eclipse.

It has its own Open Source license (the Eclipse Public Library, or EPL).

It has some hackers who hang out on #eclipse-dev on irc.freenode.net.

The main Eclipse site is here - it's huge!

Using Eclipse to hack on GNOME

You can use Eclipse to hack on GNOME now - grab Eclipse and the C Development Toolkit (CDT).

Some hackers at Red Hat put together these useful patches for working with GNOME projects:

Bugzilla Integration

This plugin adds an embedded bugzilla browsing interface to Eclipse. You can set up your favourite searches and integrate them into a project. Information on grabbing from CVS is here

ChangeLog Editing

This plugin adds support for ChangeLog editing; you can select files in a project and have a ChangeLog stub generated. It can parse C, Python and Java and handle the diffs against CVS intelligently. Information on grabbing from CVS is here

Java-GNOME Plugin

The Java-GNOME Plugin gives you is a wizard for Java-GNOME projects. It is useful for people who don’t want to fiddle with Eclipse too much when they are starting a new Java-GNOME project. To install the plugin, just unzip it into your Eclipse installation directory.

Improving Eclipse

Some more notes on extending Eclipse to integrate better with GNOME can be found on EclipseIdeas