Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Eclipse Galileo 3.5 to Helios 3.6

I did Windows for a long time. And I'm still ok with it (though I stopped upgrading at XP SP2). Just the same, I'm all in with Mac for the past couple of years. The wherefore comes down to OS X, and more specifically, Unix. Can't beat having an underlying layer of open source OS!

I'm upgrading Eclipse today. I had announced with great fanfare the coming of Eclipse Galileo, but Helios found me focused on other things, so I'm stepping up the SDK to 3.6 now. On the Windows/Mac front, I prefer the small install and configuration footprint of unix apps vs the windows registry. Power Windows users may opine otherwise, but I find the modularity of apps on the mac to be quite painless.

That said, I'm opting not for a clean install of Eclipse 3.6, but rather an upgrade from 3.5 using the software updates dialog. A little background, I use both Flash Builder and Eclipse on my MacBook, the former for AS3 and Eclipse for JS, PHP, Python, basically 'everything else'. I have added Subversive SVN to FB and it works great, and with the possible exception of mylyn in the future, I plan to keep FB in quarantine. (update: broke my own rule there, I added eGit to FB and it is flawless.)

This is just a safety, as I have had issues with other FB installs going off the rails when too many open-source libraries are added to the SDK. It can be a real train wreck when this happens, especially if you're facing a killer deadline. For the record, any deficiencies with Eclipse as a platform are simply the small and acceptable dark side to a robust and maverick developer community. So I keep FB static and use Eclipse as my test lab.

As for the SDK upgrade, it worked great. Here is a simple FAQ from Eclipse to follow. When the dialog presents you with a list of available upgrades, choose only those listed as 3.6. Better not to upgrade too many things all at once.

This is part of a larger operation which I will also post about. Namely, getting a JS/PHP/Git environment up and running within the Eclipse SDK. I've worked with TextMate thus far and will sing its charms, however, I've used Eclipse long enough to love what it does, so developing in a fully Integrated DE is my goal.

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