I think as a software developer we tend to have more than one machine lying around at home which have all been used, and if your married your wife most likely asks why you have so many computers. Well having so many machines, I often configure some flavor of Eclipse, typically the Java oriented one. In doing this I also install other items like Ant and the JDK. Since I spend most of my time thinking about architecture and understanding the business needs of customers, I always forget the little tool setup tasks that I don’t do often. So if anyone’s seen Spaceballs, this is a “short short version” of configuring Eclipse for Java development; even if you don’t use Java this is still good to go through to get Eclipse running. I break the process into 2 steps Preparation and Installation.
Preperation
Create the following path variables. To get to the system variables, right click on your computer icon and select Properties. In the Advanced tab and click the button Environment Variables. At the time of this writing these are the version of products I used so they may differ.
- HOME = {drive}:\Source
- SDKS_HOME = {drive}:\SDKs
- TOOLS_HOME = {drive}:\Tools
- JAVA_HOME = %SDKS_HOME%\jdk1.6.0_20
- MAVEN_HOME = %TOOLS_HOME%\maven-X (X is the version number)
- ANT_HOME = %TOOLS_HOME%\ant-X (X is the version number)
- MYSQL_HOME = %TOOLS_HOME%\mysql
Append the following line to the system “Path” variable: %JAVA_HOME%\bin;%MAVEN_HOME%\bin;%MYSQL_HOME%\bin;%ANT_HOME%\bin
Installation
Note that when extracting zipped files, extract files so “app-version” isn’t sub folder with the same name (i.e. “app-version” ^ ”app-version”).
- Download Java 6 JDK and install to %SDKS_HOME%\jdk1.6.0_20.
- Download Eclipse and extract to %TOOLS_HOME%\eclipse-X (I typically use Ganymede though if your a PHP person get the PDT)
- Download Maven X and extract to %TOOLS_HOME%\maven-X.
- Download Ant X and extract to %TOOLS_HOME%\ant-X
- Download MySql and extract to %TOOLS_HOME%\mysql. (optional)
Detail version can be found at AppFuse.
