Java Reference
In-Depth Information
We won't be discussing its installation or use, but we encourage you to
explore this option if you need a UML tool.
10.3
S
UN
ONE S
TUDIO
C
OMMUNITY
E
DITION
SunONE Studio (SOS) Community Edition was built on NetBeans and was
distributed for free. You would even see the NetBeans logo on startup. As of
SOS 5.0 (summer 2003), the Community Edition is no longer available—
NetBeans is what Sun recommends for the no-cost download. (The SOS Enter-
prise Edition is still actively developed and sold by Sun; it is licensed at a cost
similar to other commercial packages.)
10.4
E
CLIPSE
:T
HE
S
OURCE OF
SWT
Eclipse is yet another GUI IDE. The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) was in-
vented as part of this project. Since Eclipse uses SWT for its graphics, it has the
most familiar GUI look and feel, and it is the fastest performer on lower end
hardware.
5
Eclipse is built as an IDE toolkit. Although it was developed in
Java/SWT, you can use it to develop AWT/Swing applications. It is build
around 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
The 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 choices
to make as to what to download. As of this writing, the current production re-
lease of Eclipse is 2.1.2. If you follow the Downloads link from the main page
to 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 write
your own plug-ins and extensions to Eclipse. If you do, you will probably wish
to download the Eclipse Software Development Kit or the source code and
build Eclipse for yourself. We strongly recommend that you choose the Eclipse
SDK binary for GTK. The Motif UI is quite dated in comparison. The Eclipse
Selecting and Installing Eclipse
5. It's the fastest performer on high-end hardware too, but the difference is much less percepti-
ble. Really fast and incredibly fast are hard for humans to discern.
