Up and running with Eclipse 3.5

In a previous post, I mentioned the recent release of version 3.5 aka Galileo of the Eclipse Builder. Since that time, I have found several Galileo-compatible plug-ins that make it worthwhile to make the leap to 3.5 now rather than later.

I installed Eclipse 3.5 with the latest Graphical Editing Framework tools, 3.5.0, and the latest Aptana Studio, 1.5.1. All together this makes for an invaluable core development platform. Installing it took some trial and error, so I will share with you the successful install process I used. It took several error-prone attempts to get a clean build. Now it works just super. Here's how:

• Download Galileo 3.5 to your downloads folder and extract the zip
• Download GEF 3.5.0 from the downloads page.
• Extract the GEF 3.5.0 zip locally and add the folder resources from your unzipped GEF 3.5.0 into the corresponding Galileo 3.5 folders. Do not overwrite the folders, as sometimes happens when you unpack an archive into the destination folder. In other words, mixing these together is best done by hand.
• Run Galileo, which should fire up error free. So far so what. Now plug in some Aptana goodness. This is best done using Help>Install New Software... In the field marked Work with:, don't bother with 'Add...', just plug http://update.aptana.com/install/studio directly into the field and look for the Aptana Studio checkbox to appear below.

If this all works, you are good to go. The time saver of this how-to may not be apparent, so let me add for those who try different methods that automating the installation of GEF in one of the many apparently valid ways of doing this...will not succeed. Or at minimum, they will not succeed under OS X and Galileo Classic in Cocoa 32 bit, which is the version I opted for.

Hang loose, amigos.