Install into Self, Eclipse Galileo Feature #6

June 19, 2009 | 2 min Read

As readers of my blog are no doubt aware, I have been counting down the Top 10 Galileo features that I’m most excited about. Galileo is the name of this years “Eclipse Release Train”, the simultaneous release of 33 Eclipse projects. Galileo will available for download on June 24th, but “Friends of Eclipse” get it sooner. Friends of Eclipse is a donation program setup by the Eclipse foundation.

Support the tools that support you. The best $35.00 you will ever spend.

Number 6 on my Top 10 list is the new Install Into Self option. While many people view the Eclipse SDK as an excellent Java development environment; it’s the extensible nature of this environment that makes it so powerful. Eclipse is assembled from 100’s of plug-ins, and while you may commonly use other peoples plug-ins, the true power of Eclipse comes when you start to develop your own. Before Galileo, the steps for building / testing / deploying / installing your own plug-in were quite cumbersome. This has all changed in Eclipse 3.5.

Using Eclipse 3.5 you can quickly develop your own plug-in (maybe it’s a new static code analysis view or an awesome new twitter client – All the cool kids are building twitter clients these day), and deploy it directly into your running instance. This makes development / testing / deploying much easier and enables all developers to “eat their own dog food”.

I consider this feature a “game changer” as it completely changes the way I work with Eclipse. Kudos for this feature go to Curtis Windatt with help from John Arthorne for p2 side of things. Thanks guys!

Ian Bull

Ian Bull

Ian is an Eclipse committer and EclipseSource Distinguished Engineer with a passion for developer productivity.

He leads the J2V8 project and has served on several …