Chapter 2 Section 1 Overview

Section 1 Overview

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According to eclipse.org press release, in November 2001, an association consisting of multiple technology companies was established to "create a better product integration and development environment" [1]. The main members of this association are:

• IBM
• Merant
• Borland
• Rational
• Red Hat
• SuSE Linux

The association named eclipse.org soon released its flagship product, Eclipse, an open-source and scalable IDE for developing Java programs.

Eclipse quickly attracted the attention of developers: March 2003 copies were downloaded within two days after the release of Version 2.1 in 7,000,000. A large number of eclipse users were active in the three online Usenet news groups; websites that complement the eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org) main site have sprung up; related articles have also appeared on a large number of websites, such as IBM's developerworks (Http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/) -- Explains in detail how to use this exciting tool; rational and borland have released their respective Eclipse plug-ins for UML modeling; industry-leading code editor, slickedit's visual slickedit can now be used as Eclipse plug-ins. Eclipse also has hundreds of other plug-ins, from practical (Telnet client, J2EE environment and Profiler [2]) to Entertainment (mp3 player and Tetris clones [3. Interested readers can access the Eclipse plug-in Center (http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/) for more information about the plug-in.

Why is a Java ide so messy? First of all, from the perspective of money (in the open-source community, like free beer [4]) or from the perspective of code reuse (as free as speaking [5]) the tool is free of charge. Secondly, it has incredible scalability, and many companies and individuals have already compiled a large number of plug-ins for eclipse.

Eclipse is written in Java, but in terms of appearance and performance, it is like a local program [6]. Perhaps the most important reason is that it uses the Window Toolkit SWT-you can use it to freely build other Java programs, so that its appearance and performance are almost the same as that of local programs. This Toolkit can also be used independently of Eclipse.

This chapter introduces the initial knowledge of eclipse and SWT and jface. At the same time, we will also introduce some methods to generate SWT and jface programs without using eclipse. However, we will not talk deeply about the use of eclipse-as described in other textbooks. In fact, we will seldom mention eclipse later in this chapter. Except this chapter, all codes and commands are independent of IDE. When learning SWT and jface, you can use any development tool you like. At the end of this chapter, you will learn to use SWT and jface in any development environment.

 

[1] original note: eclipse.org Press Release, "eclipse.org consorsponforms to deliver new era application development tools," http://www.eclipse.org/org/pr.html.

[2]: a plug-in mainly used for testing.

[3] Translation: Unfortunately, the translator did not find this plug-in on the network.

[4]: the original article is Free as in beer, to use the open source community's jargon.

[5]: the original article is Free as in speech.

[6]: Original: Looks and performs as if it were a Na has ve program.

 

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