Sunday, May 05, 2013

This is an old post which remained as a draft...
 
Nightmare with Eclipse
       Had heard much about "Eclipse : the open source Java IDE". Just wanted to try out.
Had tried long back (almost a year from now).  But didn't find it appealing enough as the
other IDE that I was using at that time "Idea from IntelliJ" was par above it. The version
that I had used at that point of time was 2.0. Had done all the setup and the look and feel
was good. The act ended at that point. Never thought I would come back to it.
     1 year after, I (for some reasons...)  had to try the latest version. Downloaded it and
the greatest thing I liked was that there was no installation and anything required. Just
unzip it and run it. I didn't get it running in the first try. It required JDK 1.4 and my
system was holding onto JDK 1.3. So referred the README and there found the way
to run it with a VM as the option.
     eclipse -vm $JVM_PATH
     Got it running and it was late, after configuring all my sources I realized that there
was nothing related to Java in the Menus. No Syntax highlighting and nothing. So what's
this: wasn't this a Java IDE. Suspected my system Java configuration for this and
gave up not knowing what to do. Lot of time passed just reading the Help ...no use though.
The ultimate rescue : search in google. Luckily someone in some part of the world had
faced similar problems and so stepped onto this link
     http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=165604
     This is stupid....No where in the documentation does it mention that Java Develppment
Tool (eclipse-JDT-3.0.zip) has been moved out of the platform SDK and it is a separate plugin that is to be downloaded explicitly. With the 2.0 worship it was packaged into the
core distribution. All my curses to the guy who made this decision ..or the guy whose responsiblity was to document this stuff. So that was the end of all my woes. Am I not to bark against them for all this pain and loss of time (approximately 4 hours) for just getting my project up.

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