Eclipse Quickstart Page

I've been asked a lot of questions about getting started with Eclipse, so I'm going to try and put some relevant information together here.

Basics

The main download site for Eclipse.  

You should look at the downloads section.  I've had very good success with the stable builds.  This allows you to keep up on all the features -- of course, this can also bite you.

The projects section is where you can find information on the development roadmap and so on.

Tutorials

Eric Foster-Johnson has a great getting started article.
3plus4 Software has some good tutorials -- the one on CVS is pretty good

Tips:

How to keep your existing project layout and use Eclipse:
Linked files

Eclipse GC Performance:
Add Java VM startup options to improve GC: (see)
-vmargs -Xverify:none -XX:+UseParallelGC -XX:PermSize=20M -XX:MaxNewSize=32M -XX:NewSize=32M -Xmx256m -Xms256m

How to view the Eclipse error log:
Look under View|Other|PDE Runtime|Error Log (via Jeff Duska)
How to close lots of windows at once:
The Window-> Switch to Editor menu item allows you to quickly close all (or most) of the editor windows very easily. (via James Strachan's blog
How to use the Ant Editor
Be sure that the Ant editor is associated with build.xml. To check: open the Preferences window (Window -> Preferences) then go to Workbench -> File Associations

Features That I like

Eclipse has a lot of features, but here are some of the ones that I like the most:

Features that are missing

Plugins

Unfortunately, the rest of the Eclipse "community" has to commune off eclipse.org.  The biggest loss is that finding Eclipse plug-ins is a pain in the rear. Fortunately, Urbaan has created a registry of plug-ins.  If the plug-in developer supports the feature, Eclipse provides an Install/Update perspective that lets you install plug-ins from the net and then use an update manager to keep it up to date.  Otherwise you download a zip file and unzip it into the plugins directory.  Be sure to pay attention when unzipping because some zip files start rooted at the Eclipse directory and others start rooted at the plugins directory.

Installed Plugins that I use heavily

JCraft's CVS-SSH2 Plugin - Use CVS over SSH, includes support for SSH public key authentication.

Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin - Start and stop Tomcat from inside Eclipse, format your project as a web application..

EasyStruts  - Struts support - includes wizards to create forms, input pages and actions.  Also has a nice UI for managing struts-config.xml. Install using the Install/Update perspective.

SolarEclipse - JSP/XML highlighting support.  This still has a way to go, but it's the best open source one that there is.

JBoss-IDE - IDE Support for JBoss - Starting and stopping JBoss as well as very extensive XDoclet support.  Best when used with Eclipse 2.1M5 or later.

Call Hierarchy View - Displays static call graphs both into and out of a function

AspectJ - A nice integration of AspectJ with the Eclipse IDE and compiler.

Planty - Ant build file syntax wizard

CheckStyle - style checker

Jalopy - source formatter

Metrics - source code metrics

Installed plugins that I use occasionally

Jadclipse - bytecode decompiler

Aaguiar- Axis WSDL wizard

Solex - web testing tool

JFaceDbc - database access

QuantumDB - database access

Lunar Eclipse  - like M-/ in emacs

Zclipse - text completion - currently broken for 2.1M3

Plugins on my list to get

Tapestry Plugin -

Maven Integration -

Metrics support - NCSS and all that

C# support -

Python support -

Goo support - Goo is a dylan follow-on

Code Sugar - generate equals, clone & some others

X-men - xml support

JNDI Browser -

WSDL Viewer -

Resin Plugin -

Eclipse XDoclet Plugin -