Installing and Launching Eclipse

Imagine you have just installed Eclipse and written your first Java program. When you close the program, where does that work go, and how would you find it again next week? Eclipse answers this with a single idea: every piece of work you do in Eclipse is kept inside one place on your computer. Understanding that place, and the way the Eclipse window is arranged around your work, is the foundation for everything you will do in the environment.

This article builds that understanding in three steps. First you will look at the workspace, which is where your work is kept. Then you will look at the window, which is made of sections and views. Finally you will look at perspectives, which group those views for different jobs.

A workspace is the directory where your work is stored. Eclipse does not create it silently in the background. The first time you start Eclipse, it asks you to specify a workspace. You can accept the default name that is offered, or you can type a name of your own.

The choice matters because the workspace is the directory where your work is kept. The name you pick therefore tells you where to look later. A name chosen carelessly is a name you may struggle to recognise when you come back to your files.

A single installation of Eclipse is not limited to one workspace. You can use multiple workspaces and select the one you want at startup. Each workspace is kept separate, so the work in one does not have to mix with the work in another.

The Eclipse graphical user interface is best understood as one large window that has been divided into several sections. Each section is not empty space waiting to be filled; it holds one or more views. A view is the component that actually shows you something. Read the picture from the outside in: the window contains sections, and each section contains views.

It helps to think of views as specialist panels. A text editor view shows the source code you are writing. An I/O view is the place where a running program can read input and write output. A project list view shows the projects that the workspace contains. Because each view has a different job, the window needs several of them at once, and that is why it is divided into sections in the first place.

A view displays one type of information. Where several views share a section, tabs are used to switch between them. So a section is a region of the window, a view is the panel inside that region, and a tab is how you move from one view to another within the same region.

Follow one session from start to finish. The steps below put together the workspace choice and the window structure you have just read about.

The word perspective is easiest to grasp as a grouping. Views are the individual panels; a perspective is one arrangement of those panels that suits a particular job. A perspective is the whole set of views in the window. Changing perspective therefore changes which views make up the window, which in turn changes what the window is good for at that moment.

The Java Perspective is the default arrangement for compiling and running. The Debug Perspective is a different arrangement of views, and the source describes its purpose as helping to find semantic errors. This is the reason an experienced programmer might move to it: when the everyday arrangement is not enough to locate a problem, a perspective built around finding errors gives a more suitable set of views.