In the latest Eclipse i.e Eclipse 3.5 a.k.a Galileo, the plugin management module has been updated and so is the way one can uninstall a plugin.

To uninstall a plugin

1. Click on Help -> About Eclipse
2. Click on Installation Details button
    
3. Select the plugin which you wish to remove and click on Uninstall
   

Subversion is an open source revision control system which aims to be a replacement for CVS.

Many of the open source projects are on Subversion repository including Apache projects.

Eclipse by default comes with a CVS client and if you need to Subversion client, this is what you need to do

Download and Install the Subclipse Plugin

Subclipse is an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in providing support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE.

You can install the plugin for Eclipse 3.2/3.3 using the following update site

http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.4.x

You need to input the above URL in

Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install

If you want to install the plugin manually, the zipped versions of Subclipse are also available.

Using the Subclipse Plugin

After the plugin is installed you should see a new perspective: SVN Repository Exploring as shown below

You can now add a new SVN repository and view the same in the Repositories view.

You can execute multiple operations on the controlled element such as listing the history, comparing the element with older versions etc.

If you are new to Subversion (like me ), the below post should be of some help !

http://www.tigris.org/scdocs/Learning

Many companies have started adopting Eclipse as the default IDE for application development. In fact Eclipse has become so popular that the once popular Borland JBuilder and Weblogic Workshop have also been ported to use the Eclipse Platform.

With this there are more and more user getting introduced/started to/on Eclipse. At first the IDE might be confusing with features like “Build Automatically” etc. I have seen in many forums where users complain of not able to get started on using Eclipse for their day to day development activities.

The official Eclipse site should have been a place to find information; However its not, even after many revamps, I still feel that Eclipse.org is one of the most user un-friendly web site out there. There is more trouble when it comes to categorization/organization of content in the site.

The first thing I would recommend to any new Eclipse User is to use the Cheat Sheets ! When you start Eclipse, the Welcome page does have a link to the Cheat Sheets. (You can access the Welcome page via the Help Menu)

However not all the Cheat Sheets are displayed on the above welcome page. It only shows the Cheat Sheets which are part of the default Eclipse SDK. Many of Eclipse Projects like EMF etc contribute Cheat Sheets and this can be accessed via the Help Menu.

Cheat Sheets are a great way to get started on using a feature.

Note: If you are plug-in developer and want to build cheat sheets have a look at this article

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-ecl-cheatsheets/index.html

Following are the other places where you can find more information on Eclipse

• Eclipse Online Documentation – The same content can be viewed even from within Eclipse IDE (Help -> Help Contents). If the Help was available in PDF format, it would have been a nice add-on.
• Eclipse Articles
• Eclipse Newsgroups
• IBM Developer Works – There are some high quality Eclipse article on Developer Works
• EclipseCon – The Eclipse Conference is held every year and each year there are some high quality presentations delivered via various Eclipse Contributors and committers. Some or I should say most of the presentations are available to the public in PDF format. Dig through the sessions of EclipseCon 2007, EclipseCon 2006, EclipseCon 2005 and EclipseCon 2004

Where else can I go ?

There are lots of Blogs giving useful insight into Eclipse, few of which are written by Eclipse Committers. Few of them are listed on the sidebar of this page.

• Official Eclipse Blog
• Planet Eclipse is one site which covers the work and lives of Eclipse hackers and contributors.
• EclipseZone is another quality site providing useful Eclipse Tips and Tricks and articles on Eclipse features. The forum is also powerful in the sense that you get good responses to the problems/issues raised.
• Do keep a tab on Dzone as well for some good posts on Eclipse: http://www.dzone.com/links/tag/eclipse.html

If you use a RSS reader, I would recommend to add the RSS/Atom feeds of all the above sites. And last but not least, do subscribe to Eclipsetips.com feed as well

An important facet of designing a program for use in different countries is the localization, or externalization, of text that is displayed by the program.

By externalizing strings, the text can be translated for different countries and languages without rebuilding the Java program.

The ResourceBundle Class in Java helps you to accomplish the above task.

Resource bundles contain locale-specific objects. When your program needs a locale-specific resource, a String for example, your program can load it from the resource bundle that is appropriate for the current user’s locale.

In this way, you can write program code that is largely independent of the user’s locale isolating most, if not all, of the locale-specific information in resource bundles.

More information on Java ResourceBundle here.

If your application is not using the Resource Bundle, you can always use the Eclipse “Externalize String” feature to move all the translatable strings into a properties file. In addition, the wizard also creates a helper class to access the resource bundle.

ResourceBundle Editor

Whenever you define a new “key value” data in one properties file, you have to add the same in all the other properties file. The same applies when you delete a key from one of the properties file. This process can get messy if you are modifying lot of files;

ResourceBundle Editor plug-in is a perfect companion to handle the above task with ease.

File Association

ResourceBundle Editor (RBE) is an editor extension for “.properties” file. By default, Eclipse opens the properties file in the Properties File Editor. You can either selectively open the properties file in RBE or set RBE as the default editor.

User Interface

As mentioned earlier, RBE associates itself with a properties file in the Eclipse workspace. RBE is a tabbed editor; There is a “Properties” tab which is the primary tab used to add/modify new/existing key value pairs.

There is a default tab whose view is similar to the default properties editor. In addition to this, each locale specific file is also opened in a tab.

The keys in the tree view are always sorted. You can quickly create a new key and associate values using the local specific text boxes. There are options even to rename a key and also to duplicate a key.

The view of the tree can either be flat or hierarchical. The default view can be controlled via the Preference page.

Also you can quickly create a new Resource bundle using the “New” tab.

Other features

• RBE can also report missing values. This can be identified by the icon status for each key in the tree view.
• Can toggle between flat and hierarchical view of keys.
• Supports Eclipse “nl” structure for I18N of plugins
• Wizard for creating new resource bundle.
• Non-ASCII character conversion to/from Unicode.

Issues

When you try to create a new key in an empty properties file, a NullPointerException is logged in the Error View. In order to avoid this, you should start with a file which has at least one key defined.

I couldn’t find how RBE reports duplicate and similar keys.

Summary

RBE is a must have plug-in if you are dealing with multiple properties file. Even otherwise, its a good alternative to the default Properties Editor.

Additional information about internationalized applications can be found in the following documents:

• http://eclipse.org/articles/Article-Internationalization/how2I18n.html
• http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/intro/index.html

Download ResourceBundle Editor

One of the notable things in this years Eclipse Release (Europa) is the way the Eclipse packages are released. In previous releases each project(WTP,DTP) had to be separately downloaded and installed.

For e.g. if you wanted a XML editor in Eclipse, you had to download and install the Web Tools Platform (WTP) package. With Europa there are set of 4 well defined packages targeted towards specific segment of developers.

Eclipse IDE for Java Developers

This package consists of the basic IDE with superior Java editing, incremental compilation, code assist etc. Also it includes the XML Editor (from WTP package).

The other packages included are:

• Base Platform
• JDT – Java Development Tooling
• CVS Client
• XML/XSD Editor
• Mylyn – Task Focused UI for Eclipse
• GEF
• EMF

Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers

This package is specially targeted for web developers. Many eclipse users are still not aware of Eclipse WTP project and hence I had encountered in many of the forums, where users complained of not being able to use Eclipse for Web Development.

Eclipse IDE for Java EE includes:

• Base Platform
• JDT
• Eclipse PDE – Plug-in Development Environment
• CVS Client
• Java IDE
• EMF
• GEF
• XML/XSD/HTML and JSP Editor
• Mylyn
• Datatools – Which help you quickly work with different DB’s.

Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers

If you are just interested in doing C/C++ development with Eclipse, you should download this package.

It includes

• Base Platform
• CDT – C/C++ Development Tooling
• CVS Client

Eclipse IDE for RCP/Plug-in Developers

This packages contains a complete set of tools for developers who want to create plug-ins and Rich Client Applications based on Eclipse.

It includes:

• Base Platform
• Eclipse SDK with complete source code
• EMF
• GEF
• Mylyn
• XML/XSD editor

If you do understand the different Eclipse packages, have a look at the official page detailing the different features in each Eclipse distribution.

There are times when you need to restart Eclipse (other than the obvious reasons)

• If you are running the IDE for days together, the IDE does become sluggish. A quick look at the memory occupied by Eclipse also is an indication to restart Eclipse
• If you install new plugins when the IDE is active/open, the new plugin functionality is not activated until you restart Eclipse.

The normal way to restart is to close the IDE (saving the workspace) and again run Eclipse.exe. If you have a shortcut, it would definitely help you to start Eclipse quickly.

However there is another easy way to restart Eclipse:

File -> Switch Perspective -> Choose your Current Workspace

If you use more of keyboard than mouse, you should do this:

Alt + F + W -> Select your current Workspace

This will quickly close Eclipse and restarts the IDE using the same workspace that you were working on.

If you have installed any new plugins, they will be loaded during the restart. (In some rare cases, the plugin might not load and hence you might have to do “eclipse -clean“)

Eclipse Plugins show the true power of Eclipse extensible architecture. You can add new functionality to the IDE by extending the extension points contributed by the base plugins.

Here are some of the sites where you could search for Eclipse Plugins

• Eclipse.org
  Eclipse.org has long list of committed projects which add on new dimensions to the functionality of Eclipse.

  Other than this, there are a host of Technology Projects (incubation projects), few of which are finally converted to a committed project based on the popularity and other factors. 

• Eclipse-Plugins.2y.net
  Even though the domain name is kind of weird, this site is one of the first places to organize the different eclipse plugins into appropriate categories.

  Plugins are also rated and this helps you to make decisions when you have more than one plugin to accomplish the same task.

• EclipsePluginCentral.com
  Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC) offers the Eclipse community a convenient, information-rich portal that helps software developers find open source and commercial Eclipse plug-ins, tools, and products that enhance the entire Java software development life-cycle.

  The interface is much better compared to Eclipse-Plugins.2y.net and searching for plugins is also a treat in this web site.

• OnEclipse Plugins
  OnEclipse is another web site devoted to improve the productivity of Eclipse Users. They also have a nice collection/categorization of Eclipse Plugins.

I have been wanting to host a dedicated site to write posts on Eclipse. Till now I was using another weblog to write content on Eclipse and related plugins.

I have been trying to participate/contribute in the Orkut Eclipse forum, however its being filled with more spam and less of Eclipse these days. Its one of the primary reasons I intend to host a forum on this site which should help users to get started on using Eclipse as their primary development environment.

These are some of the popular posts from my other weblog.

1. History of Eclipse
2. Install Eclipse Plugins – The Easy Way
3. Comic Viewer – Eclipse Plugin written by Harish – Useful for reading comics from within Eclipse.
4. EclEmma – Java Code Coverage
5. Camel Case Search in Eclipse
6. Automated GUI Recorder
7. How To : Tail Files in Eclipse IDE
8. How To: Browse Remote Files in Eclipse IDE
9. Source Control in Eclipse IDE

You can expect more such similar posts in the coming days.Also if anybody is interested on writing about eclipse you can either drop a comment here or use the “Contact Us” page.