Segmentation Fault: Core dumped..;-)

Setting up an Eclipse-based Java Development Environment on WinXP (Part 2)

Posted : June 30, 2004 at 3:58 pm [America/Los_Angeles]

In my last post (Part 1) of this series, I had spent some time listing softwares that needed to be installed as part of the Java development environment setup and going over a few installation and post-installation details. In this entry, the focus is on configuring Eclipse. Specifically, on:

1. Setting up a custom Perspective and making it your default Perspective, and
2. Tweaking Eclipse preferences where necessary

When Eclipse is launched for the very first time, it brings up a “Workspace Launcher” dialog box, essentially asking you to select a “workspace”. I prefer setting up a seperate folder ( D:\development-root\tools\eclipse-workspace\1) as my default workspace. Upon selecting the default workspace and clicking OK, Eclipse brings up a “Welcome to Eclipse 3.0″ page. Feel free to browse its content if you must. Personally, I just click on the arrow at the top-right hand corner (”Go to the workbench”) and move along.

Setting up a custom perspective and making it the default:

Eclipse, by default, opens up the “Resource” perspective. Switch to the “Java” perspective by selecting Window | Open Perspective | Java. The default Java perspective looks as shown in the figure below:

Eclipse comes with a lot of views (Window | Show View | Other..). After a little trial and error, I decided upon creating a custom “Java” perspective with views as shown below:

Click on the image to enlarge

To set up a custom perspective, here are the steps that I followed:

1. Make sure you’re in Java perspective.
2. Open all the views that you would like to add to your custom perspective (Window | Show View | Other..). Once open, move the views around until they are arranged in a way that feels right to you. The figure above shows how I prefer arranging the views in my custom perspective.
3. Go to Window | Save Perspective As… and enter a name for this perspective. Click OK.
4. Now, that you’ve your very own perspective, let’s make sure Eclipse opens this perspective everytime we open it up. For that, go to Window | Preferences | Workbench > Perspectives. Under Available Perspectives, select your custom perspective and click on the Make Default button. Click Apply, and then OK and you’re all set!

Tweaking Eclipse preferences:

All Eclipse preferences are neatly stacked under Window | Preferences menu option. So, how do I share the tweaks that I made to Eclispe? I could take a whole bunch of screenshots. Or, I could just list out the tweaks that I made in a text document. The first option, although visual and probably easy for the end user to understand, was ruled out as it would be a disk-space hungry solution. I decided to take the second route. However, before I unleash the changes, let’s try to understand how did I go about documenting it:

Now, suppose I wanted to document the fact that under Java | Editor | Appearance Tab, Show Line Numbers is checked (see figure above). The way I do it in my document is as follows:

Java
-----
Java > Editor
   [Appearance]
      Checked "Show Line Numbers"

With that said, here’s the list of all the tweaks that I made after my default install. Please feel free to add/edit/change my tweaks to suit your needs.

That’s it. Feel free to reflect on all the things you’ve done so far and make any changes that you think would make things even easier for you. Frankly, I would strongly encourage you to treat the set up of your development environment as an iterative process which you ought to keep doing as you get more and more into serious Java development. Remember, these are just tools which are there to make your actual task - writing Java applications - simpler. If they do, great. If they don’t or hinder the process more than help, feel free to re-think your whole development environment set up.

In Part 3, I plan on covering how to set up and write a stand-alone Java application. In Part 4, the discussion would focus on setting up and writing a web-based application.

- Anand

Category: Application Development