Eclipse Help and Community, part 1

  I recenly got permission from the publisher to run a series of excerpts from my Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide book here on EclipseZone. The first installment covers online help, the eclipse.org web site, and community web sites.

This is an excerpt from the Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide . Copyright© 2005 O'Reilly Media, Inc. Ed Burnette, author. Used with permission.

Welcome to the Eclipse community. Membership is free, and you've already taken the first steps by installing the software and reading this guide. To help you go further, online help, web sites, articles, and other resources are available to assist you, as are thousands of Eclipse enthusiasts from around the world.

Online Help

Eclipse provides an extensible online help system with details about the version of Eclipse you're using and any plug-ins you have installed. It can be searched and viewed in several different ways.

Getting Help

The most common way to view online help is to select Help Help Contents. A separate Help window will open, showing several help topics. Expand the topics to hone in on the information you need, or enter a keyword in the Search field at the top of the window.

Another way to get help is with dynamic help. To use dynamic help, simply press F1 (or select Help Dynamic Help) and an embedded Help view will appear. As your focus changes to different views and editors, the Help content is updated to show help for what you are doing at the moment. Select Help Search Help… to find help topics relevant to the view you're currently in.

Help Topics

If you install the Eclipse SDK you will find the following topics listed in the Help contents:

Workbench User Guide
Contains information on how to use the IDE in general, independent of your programming language.

Java Development User Guide
Discusses how to use the Java language support (editors, views, etc.) provided by Eclipse.

Platform Plug-in Developer Guide
Covers the concepts and programming interfaces used to write Eclipse plug-ins.

JDT Plug-in Developer Guide
Covers writing plug-ins specifically for the Java Development Tools.

PDE Guide
Describes how to use the plug-in development environment included in the Eclipse SDK.

Tip: Depending on your options, some of these topics may be hidden. Click the Show All Topics button to see them all.

Eclipse Web Site

The official Eclipse web site, http://www.eclipse.org, is your best source of information on Eclipse: the platform, the IDE, and the community. The design of this site may change over time, but as of this writing, the major sections are:

About us
Learn about the Eclipse project, how it got started, who is involved in it, how the governance works, legal questions, logo programs, and so forth.

Projects
Eclipse development is split into top-level projects, subprojects, and components. On the Projects page, you can see how all this is organized. Drill down to get to FAQs, documentation, source code, etc.

Download
This area is where you'll find the latest prebuilt versions of Eclipse.

Articles
The articles section is full of technical information for developers using or extending Eclipse. Consider writing an article yourself to add to the community knowledge base.

Newsgroups
The main user forums are found here (see the "Newsgroups" section, later in this chapter).

Community
This is where you'll find out about conferences, user groups, web sites, books, courses, free and commercial plug-ins, awards, and much more.

Search
Locate any page at eclipse.org, including newsgroup and mailing list archives.

Bugs
Find or report bugs and enhancement requests.

Community Web Sites

Many individuals and companies have created web sites to address particular needs of the community. Here are a few of the most popular ones. More can be found in the Community Resources area of the eclipse.org web site.


EclipseZone (http://www.eclipsezone.com)
An online community by and for Eclipse users everywhere.

Planet Eclipse (http://planeteclipse.org)
Planet Eclipse is a window into the world, work, and lives of Eclipse users and contributors.

Plug-ins Registry (http://eclipse-plugins.info)
This is a nonprofit registry of Eclipse plug-ins, created and maintained by Eclipse users.

Eclipse Plugin Central (http://eclipseplugincentral.com)
This site offers a plug-in directory, reviews, ratings, news, forums, and listings for products and services.

Eclipse Wiki (http://eclipse-wiki.info)
This user-editable web site has FAQs, tips, tricks, and other useful information.

IBM AlphaWorks (http://alphaworks.ibm.com/eclipse)
Part of IBM's emerging technologies web site, this is dedicated to Eclipse and WebSphere-related projects and plug-ins.

IBM developerWorks (http://ibm.com/developerworks/opensource)
developerWorks hosts a variety of tutorials, articles, and related information on Eclipse and other open source projects.

Apache (http://www.apache.org)
Apache software is used throughout Eclipse, and the two projects collaborate in many areas.

Source Forge (http://sf.net)
A large and growing number of Eclipse plug-ins are being developed in this open source nexus.

O'Reilly Open Source (http://opensource.oreilly.com)
This O'Reilly Resource Center provides a broad range of references and links to publications about open source.