Eclipse is my favourite IDE. I have seen it go from 1.x to 3.0.1 today. I have also seen it move from being a IBM project to a open source giant with a consortium boasting of several industrial giants - and with great delight, i may add :)
However, until the recent past, i had falled behind on using it. Today, i came across an article on eclipse and it roused my desire to get my hands dirty with some java work again. Back then, i was trying to study eclipse's PDE (platform development environment). Today, i decided to catch up, and my! i must say - it has come a long way since then.
However, i have a few rants - eclipse's download size!! Its gone up to 85MB (groan)! Admitted its got those many features - but .. its gonna be a few days until my download finishes (i am still using a slowwwwwww connection). Secondly, i tried looking up tutorials on the subject of writing plugins for 3.0 (double groan!). I was a bit dissappointed to see that not a lot of them exist :-( Do u know of any (do drop me a link as a comment to this entry).
IBM still has 2.0 tutorials written as early as 2002! The eclipse article section isnt too updated as well. I mean, its got stuff that talks about 3.0, etc. But if i am someone who is using eclipse 3.0 and haven seen 2.0 (neither do i want to!) and want to write eclipse plugins - where am i supposed to start! Reading how it was in 2.0 and then 3.0! why? The closest i came to something that was as detailed as i would like it was PDE does plugin and that too was written in Sept 2003.
Well, i am not going to let that stop me. I have decided to start my study - from the start and come up with a tutorial myself. Thats gonna take time - but i am going to do it! The Eclipse wiki seems like a good place to start at.
See also: Writing Plugins for Firefox