Running Eclipse IDESJSP Home « Running Eclipse IDE
In this lesson we look at running and configuring the Eclipse IDE for the first time. The first thing you need to do is go to the directory into which you extracted the Eclipse IDE. On my Windows7 x64 system I
just accepted the defaults and so for me this was C:\eclipse-jee-luna-SR2-win32-x86_64\eclipse. Within this directory double click on the Eclipse icon to start up the Eclipse IDE and you see a window
asking for the destination for your workspace.
Eclipse Workspace
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The workspace is where Eclipse keeps all your projects as well as storing metadata about your plugins. Select a path where you want to store future projects; it's good practice to select a destination outside your Eclipse installation so when you upgrade your Eclipse version you can delete the old version and retain the workspace. You can change your workspace whenever you startup the Eclipse IDE or just select your path as the default. The following screenshot shows workspace startup screen and the default path on my system:
Once you have selected a path for your workspace press OK and you will be presented with the welcome screen similar to the one shown in the following screenshot. You can look at the overview, do the tutorials
etc at your leisure, by pressing the Help tab from the workbench, so we won't go over this now.
From the screen above press the workbench icon which is situated near the right top of the screen.
Eclipse Workbench Top
The following screenshot shows the Eclipse workbench on initial startup.
We need to set a JRE so from the menu bar at the top of the workbench select Window | Preferences to display the preferences dialog screen. From the left pane go down to Java | Installed JREs
and verify that the JDK we installed in the Getting The Java Software Development Kit (JDK) section is present and ticked. If it isn't
present then click the Add button to add a reference to the JDK you installed.
The following screenshot shows the version I installed and as you can see this is ticked for use within the Eclipse IDE.
Lesson 2 Complete
In this lesson we ran the Eclipse IDE for the first time and configured it to use our Java Software Development Kit.
What's Next?
In the next lesson we look at integrating the Tomcat server into Eclipse.
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