Archive for August, 2007

EasyEclipse is a distribution of Eclipse software development platform that simplifies the tasks of downloading, installing and maintenance while providing the same rich development environment of Eclipse. In the words of EasyEclipse creators:

EasyEclipse packages together Eclipse and selected open source plugins and is free and open-source, easy to download and install, and simple to maintain, without version and dependency issues.

EasyEclipse has become the perfect Eclipse distribution for me as I have always hated the fact that the newer versions of plugins played havoc with my old installation of Eclipse or vice versa; upgrading is so much simpler with EasyEclipse. All the work that I used to do of locating various plugins from all sorts of locations on the Internet, downloading and installing them, testing them, and once that is done, trying to always maintain the latest versions of Eclipse as well as all the installed plugins, is now done for me by the EasyEclipse creators. At least for the collection of plugins that EasyEclipse supports.

There are several different packages that can be downloaded from the EasyEclipse website depending on the kind of development environment one wants to set up. This further reduces the getting-started-with-eclipse curve. There are three major distribution categories:

1. Distributions for web and dynamic languages

   Following packaged distributions are available for different type of web technologies:

   • For PHP development: EasyEclipse for PHP
   • For Python development: EasyEclipse for Python
   • For Ruby On Rails development: EasyEclipse for Ruby on Rails

   If you want one distribution to develop all kind of web applications, there is a ~180MB EasyEclipse for LAMP distribution that includes PHP, Python, Perl as well as Ruby on Rails environments. If you don’t already have a web server/database installed for testing web applications, XAMPP is the easiest way to do so.

2. Distributions for Java

   The following varieties of Java distributions are available:

   • Bare-bones: EasyEclipse Expert Java (Useful as a starting point to create personalised environment by installing user selected plugins)
   • GUI with Swing/AWT: EasyEclipse Desktop Java
   • Servlets, JSP, EJB etc: EasyEclipse Server Java
   • J2ME: EasyEclipse Mobile Java

3. Distribution for C/C++

   For C/C++ development, EasyEclipse neatly packages Eclipse with the CDT plugin as well as several other useful plugins; to access CVS/Subversion repositories, generating Doxygen documentation, etc. My experience of installing CDT in Eclipse always had mixed results whereas EasyEclipse for C++ worked every single time I installed it, on every single platform it supports. Eclipse for C++(just like Eclipse) needs some kind of a C/C++ development environment already installed on the system: Topic of next post.

There is also an EasyEclipse distribution for Eclipse plugin development: EasyEclipse Plugin Warrior

Once one of the above distributions is selected as the appropriate one based on one’s requirements, additional plugins can be installed easily by downloading them from EasyEclipse Plugins web page. All these plugins are well tested with all the EasyEclipse distributions and hence problems arise on very rare occasions. Such problems can be addressed at EasyEclipse Forum or the mailing list. There is an #easyeclipse channel on irc.freenode.net too but you need to hit the right time to find someone to answer your queries there.

If you want completely personalised Eclipse environment and you find all the plugins you need on EasyEclipse Plugins page, then start with EasyEclipse Expert Java and install just the plugins you need. You can also install all the plugins for Web, Java and C++ development this way to create a complete development environment(I start with Server Java or LAMP versions to do the same; saves me some time).

Last Words

EasyEclipse doesn’t (officially) support all the plugins that exist for Eclipse, far from it. But all these plugins do work with EasyEclipse just like they do with Eclipse, they are merely not tested by the EasyEclipse maintainers. In that sense, EasyEclipse gives me a better starting point than Eclipse does. I do hope that the number of Eclipse plugins supported by EasyEclipse increases with passing time.