Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

10.4 Eclipse: The Source of SWT251We won’t be discussing its installation or use, but we encourage you toexplore this option if you need a UML tool.10.3SUNONE STUDIO COMMUNITY EDITIONSunONE Studio (SOS) Community Edition was built on NetBeans and wasdistributed for free. You would even see the NetBeans logo on startup. As ofSOS 5.0 (summer 2003), the Community Edition is no longer available—NetBeans is what Sun recommends for the no-cost download. (The SOS EnterpriseEdition is still actively developed and sold by Sun; it is licensed at a costsimilar to other commercial packages.)10.4ECLIPSE:THE SOURCE OF SWTEclipse is yet another GUI IDE. The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) was inventedas part of this project. Since Eclipse uses SWT for its graphics, it has themost familiar GUI look and feel, and it is the fastest performer on lower endhardware. 5 Eclipse is built as an IDE toolkit. Although it was developed inJava/SWT, you can use it to develop AWT/Swing applications. It is buildaround a plug-in architecture, so it can be an IDE for virtually any language.To use it for Java, you must actually install the Java plug-ins.10.4.1 Selecting and Installing EclipseThe main site for obtaining Eclipse is www.eclipse.org. Installing Eclipse,particularly for a single user, is incredibly easy. But first, you have a few choicesto make as to what to download. As of this writing, the current production releaseof Eclipse is 2.1.2. If you follow the Downloads link from the main pageto the 2.1.2 build, you will see a fairly lengthy list of download choices.The first major choice you must make is whether or not you plan to writeyour own plug-ins and extensions to Eclipse. If you do, you will probably wishto download the Eclipse Software <strong>Development</strong> Kit or the source code andbuild Eclipse for yourself. We strongly recommend that you choose the EclipseSDK binary for GTK. The Motif UI is quite dated in comparison. The Eclipse5. It’s the fastest performer on high-end hardware too, but the difference is much less perceptible.Really fast and incredibly fast are hard for humans to discern.