My first experience with a Java IDE was VisualAge for Java back in 2000. Before long, my company's development team moved on to WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD) which before long was rebranded as Rational Application Developer (RAD).
It's funny now but after all these years, this will be the first time I have used the regular Eclipse IDE and not the IBM branded version. What's the difference anyway? My understanding is that IBM's version had additional support for integration with other IBM products in the IBM and Rational product suite. I guess I don't really know all the differences. Anyone have any additional details they can add? Please feel free to add comments to this post.
I downloaded Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (Helios 3.6.2) and unzipped it to a folder near the root of my workstation: C:\dev\eclipse\eclipse_EE_3.6.2. That's the install in a nutshell. Nothing to it.
Documentation for installing and configuring Eclipse can be found in the Getting Started section of the The Official Eclipse FAQs.
So why install Java EE version instead of the standard Java version? The Compare Packages page details the differences between the two versions. The EE includes packages needed for web development. Namely the Web Tools and the Data Tools. These tools will be necessary as I develop using Hibernate persistence in MySQL and deploy to Tomcat.
I guess now is a good time to mention that I'm using an Dell XPS/Dimension 400/9150 circa 2006 with a single dual core 2.79 GHz CPU with only 1 GB of RAM. This old boy is still running Windows XP. Is this sufficient power for running a development environment with Eclipse, Tomcat, MySQL? I hope so. For the time being, I've splurged and ordered another 1 GB of RAM. Hopefully, 2GB is noticeably better than 1 GB of RAM.
Prior to the Eclipse installation, I installed JDK 1.6.0_24.
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