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).

Apparently CDT now includes Autotools support, which is the build system most GNome projects use. On the Fedora, an Autotools project support has always been part of eclipse-cdt package.http://www.eclipse.org/linuxtools/projectPages/autotools/

You can add Package config support to Eclipse [http://code.google.com/p/pkg-config-support-for-eclipse-cdt/ here], to allow you to easily add dependancies on Gnome and it's libraries.http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=807706

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

PackageKit Integration

This plugin adds PackageKit integration to Eclipse proposing you to install missing parts for you based on various information (e.g. missing pkg-config requires from Autotools projects. https://fedorahosted.org/eclipse-packagekit/

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

Gnome documentation integration

System installed gtk-doc generated documentation is available from the Eclipse help center thanks to the libhover plugin (part of the eclipse-cdt package on Fedora). More info here.

Valgrind integration

Valgrind integration is available from the Eclipse Linux Tools project. Project page and User guide.

Oprofile integration

Oprofile integration is available from the Eclipse Linux Tools project. Project page and User guide.

Perf integration

Perf integration is available from the Eclipse Linux Tools project. User guide.

Improving Eclipse

Some more notes on extending Eclipse to integrate better with GNOME can be found on /Ideas.