Installing Eclipse and CFEclipse plugin
Well my new machine is here on the desk and I have struglled for 2 days already to get software loaded. I'll tell you later about MS Office 2007 but for now I have just installed Eclipse and CF Eclipse. I found an interesting blog post about a way to install eclipse plugins. Despite the title of the post its not too easy but this method has a big advantage. You can uninstall the plugin or copy to another instance very easily.
Basicly all the plugin code sits in its own directory and a sparate .link file points to it. That way you don't end up with a starnge collection of files in the plugins and features where you can't see what's what.
Unfortunately it doesn't always work.
For me it worked fine with CFEclipse and Aptana but JSEclipse did not show up as a perspective in eclipse and XMLBudy seems not to have the required file structure. Am I doing somthing wrong or expecting the wrong thing?
I recently installed Office 2007 too. It loads up noticeably slower than the 2003 suite and has a few quirks.
My favourite is that an email with a file attachment sent from Outlook 2007 cannot be viewed by a Mac user running the Microsoft Entourage email client! All they receive is a winmail.dat attachment
that they can't do anything with. Even inline images aren't there. Also the Outlook html rendering engine which used to use the IE6 engine has been replaced by Outlooks own engine which has a
different understanding of html and CSS, so anything more than a basic html email may not look quote right. The new "ribbon" GUI doesn't extend across the entire 2007 suite which is rather inconsistent
but in some way a good thing. With menus you knew where everything was, but now you need to move your mouse further and it can take a while to work out where certain functions are hidden.
Whilst using the .links method does work (it does have drawbacks) the better way to do this is to create an extension directory in which to store any third party plugins/features. It has much the same functionality as the .links method without the kludge.
I use Linux :-), however if you are on a Windows box :-(, then you can consider the following layout:
C:\Program Files\Eclipse...
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse... {Main installation}
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse_extension... {External extensions}
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse_extension\eclipse... {Must be present and named as such}
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse_extension\eclipse\.eclipseextension {Empty file - extension descriptor}
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse_extension\eclipse\features... {Features if any}
C:\Program Files\Eclipse\eclipse_extension\eclipse\plugins... {Plugins}
OK...
So with the above in mind launch eclipse.exe with any optional arguments (eg. -data [workspace], -nosplash [don't show splash screen], -clean [tidy up eclipse], etc...) and go to the Help/Software Updates/Manage Configuration menu option.
At the top of the node tree on the left right click and choose to Add/Extension Location. From there at file browser will appear where you will navigate to the eclipse_extension folder (see above), go into the sub folder "eclipse" where the ".eclipseextension" file is present and settle on that location (you should see the plugins and features folders at this level).
Click OK all the way to get out of the dialogs and Eclipse should tell you to restart the workbench so that your new extension location becomes fully available.
Next up go to the CFEclipse homepage and get the update URL 1.30 release now (congrats all round to those who did this for us) and then relaunch Eclipse and set it up with the only real difference being that you at some point use the eclipse_extension location to store your new plugins/features (towards the end of the update process you are prompted as to where you'd like CFEclipse installed to).
Why...
Not really sure to be honest. I know that I consider any extensions I get from the Eclipse foundation to belong to the main eclispe installation directory and any third party tools should go into the extension area. This should ease future upgrades and if you ever need to trash your main Eclipse install and start from scratch you can maintain your third party stuff by just letting Eclipse know about the extension location already defined and setup.
The best thing all around is to do as I have done and read the manual for Eclipse (http://help.eclipse.org/). Let's face it, you'll use Eclipse everyday so understand how it works to get the most out of it.
Currently I am investigating Eclipse external tools and how to integrate the plethora of GNU/Linux utilities into the workbench. Great stuff.
Let me know how you get on please.
Thanks
Ethan Cane
Web Developer
Got your post in one minute after mine.
:-)
No I just have to work out how to place and use JSEclipse.
XMLBuddy you have to drop into the plugin folder, but Aptana, CFEclipse, JSEclipse and subclipse all use this option for installation.
Most plugins already have their own folder, although, Aptana is ginormous, so it lives in 4 folders, but otherwise all the loose files are down to eclipse itself....
Ah... just installed JSEclipse... It looks like it doesn't have a perspective of its own. If you right click on a JS file you get the option to open the file using JSEclipse, which then gives you a menu item with 4 options in the main menu bar and fun stuff in the ouline view. URL for the auto installer instructions is : http://www.interaktonline.com/Documentation/JSEcli...
Hope that helps