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Eclipse Tutorial - Installing and Running Eclipse

Posted January 24th, 2007 by RickPalmer

This free online tutorial will walk you through the steps required to install and run Eclipse 3.2.1; the state-of-the-art Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that can be used for multiple programming languages, the most popular being Java.

You'll first need to download the Eclipse zip file from http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/ and install it by unzipping it to the root of your hard drive. This should create a C:\eclipse folder on your system.

Eclipse is a memory hog, so you’ll need at least 512 MB of RAM on your system, and a minimum of 1 GB is recommended for a development workstation.

Launching Eclipse

Double-click C:\eclipse\eclipse.exe from Windows Explorer to launch Eclipse for the first time. It’s helpful to create a desktop shortcut to this file to simplify future launches.

Eclipse requires a Java Runtime Environment to be installed on your system, and is not included in the Eclipse download. If you do not have Java installed on your system, you will receive the following error message (Fig 1). To resolve this issue, download and install the Java 1.4.2 SDK from Sun at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html (about 55 MB).

Fig 1 - Java Runtime Environment Required to Launch Eclipse

When you run Eclipse for the first time, it will prompt you for a default workspace where it will store your projects (Fig 2). You can accept the default, but I recommend using something simpler like C:\Projects. This will come in handy later on when we try to compile or run our application from the command line.

Fig 2 – Select a Workspace

Once Eclipse has finished loading, it will display a Welcome page containing icons for Overview, Tutorials, Sample Code, and What’s New. Click the Overview icon and then click the Workbench basics icon.

Read the description of the Eclipse platform, and select the Perspectives link in the Related Topics section near the bottom of the page. Read about Perspectives and how they are used by Eclipse, and then select the Views link to learn about how Eclipse uses Views to display different features within each Perspective.

The tutorials provided by Eclipse are worth reading, and will help you quickly get up to speed quickly with this powerful IDE.

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How to connect to Oracle from jsp page in eclipse

On July 5th, 2007 Anonymous (not verified) says:

Hello All,
I am having a webapplication that uses jsp as front end and oracle as the backend. I am using Eclipse as my development platform with Tomcat as the App Server. My Jsp works fine. I need to connect to the Oracle database installed locally in my system. What are the steps that need to be done? Should I install any .jar files like the ojdbc14.jar or classes12.jar. They are in my oracle library. Should they also be present in my eclipse directory.

Any help would be appreciated.

Please take the Java Course - JDBC MySQL Database Connectivity

On July 11th, 2007 RickPalmer says:

Thanks for posting your question.

Please refer to the instructions in the Java Course - JDBC MySQL Database Connectivity for configuring your JDBC driver.

Rick

Which version of Java will work with Eclipse?

On January 25th, 2007 Jeff (not verified) says:

The Eclipse executable seems to think that version 1.3.1_01 is my latest Java version,
when this is untrue. It will not install. I know I have the right version. I'm not sure if I
should try reinstalling my JVM. Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks.

Verify your Java version

On January 25th, 2007 RickPalmer says:

Hi Jeff,

You can check the version your system thinks is the default, by running java - version at a command prompt.

Often the problem is that another application has installed its own version of Java - Oracle is famous for doing this.
If that's the case, then reinstalling the SDK should make your SDK the current version.

You can also check your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\JavaSoft\Java Runtime
Environment\CurrentVesrion key, which is probably 1.3 on your system and should be set to
1.4. Hack the registry at your own risk though ;-) .... it might be easier to just reinstall the SDK.

I think I'm having a similar problem

On January 25th, 2007 Mike (not verified) says:

I think I'm having a similar problem. When I try to start Eclipse, I get the follwing error
message,

A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) must be available in
order to run Eclipse. No Java virtual machine was found after searching the following
locations:
C:\eclipse\jre\bin\javaw.exe
'javaw.exe' in your current path

I also had Oracle installed for a class, and I reinstalled Java, but I still keep getting this
message. Is it just a matter of telling my system the correct path? I'm not sure how to
do that.

Thanks in advance,

Mike

Uninstall Oracle first, and then reinstall Java