eclipse (mis)adventures
i have been looking for a replacement for my html editor for the longest time. i’ve been a loyal user of homesite starting from version 1.2 until 4.5.2. i still use it quite a lot but it is showing its age — it gives me warnings when i use xml tags. i know there’s a version 5.5 available through the adobe-macromedia site but i’m not willing to shell out the us$29.00 upgrade price just yet. yeah, yeah. i’m a cheapskate. but hey, times are hard. 
so, in an attempt to hold on to what i have i decided to help homesite spew out xhtml code by creating some shortcuts to replace some of the built-in tags. the only tag that gave me a bit of trouble is image (img) tag. i tried hacking into the img tag definition just to add the ‘ /’ (space + closing slash) at the end of the tag to make it compliant but it just doesn’t want to. that bit encouraged me look for another html editor. download.com had plenty of editors and a handful of good ones. i’ve actually tried a few popular ones but they didn’t give me that ‘ding!’ that i was looking for. i still have to evaluate a couple more though.
a css editor is a must with today’s web pages but the one that came with homesite — bradbury software’s topstyle lite does the job pretty well and it can be used independently so i’m not exactly looking for a replacement for that piece of software.
there is also the handful of javascripts that i mess with and, since i started using wordpress, i’ve been looking at and using some php code as well. once in a blue moon, have a bunch of perl scripts that i hack into. i’ve configured homesite to be the default editor for these files but it wasn’t exactly born to it. although it does have pretty syntax highlighting for those files.
i’m also trying to wade into xml and most of its sub-thingies (ok i forget all those acronyms) and i found out that my homesite cannot handle that. i also found out that xml editing software has a lot more features and is expensive. ugh. be still my aching wallet.
so after the door met with my forehead 8O, i got this gut feel that there should be a free editor out there that can handle this web stuff — xhtml, html, css, javacript and xml. it may even handle php and/or perl. so after a handful of searching and reading and some more searching and re-reading i slowly discovered that eclipse may be able to replace my html editor and then some.
ok. eclipse, they say, is a great java development environment. officially, “eclipse is an open (ide) platform for anything, and for nothing in particular.“ it supports java development out of the box, but it can be configured to support other development environments through plug-ins. if you want to know more, the eclipse guys put up a wiki with all the faqs. read if you’re up to it.
let’s get a few facts out of the way. i’m not a java developer. i have made a few very simple textbook-type java programs just to try to learn the language. i’ve also tried assembly programming for a while but i don’t get to be that crazy all the time ;-). i spent more time with pascal and c using borland’s dos-based integrated development environment (ide) but that was when dos was still king. i liked borland’s ide because it was quick and easy to learn and they have a couple of companion books that were very helpful.
most of my coding are done in xhtml, html, css and the rest are in php, javascript and some learning lessons in perl and xml. that’s it. from the eclipse documentation i can probably bend eclipse to be used as a development tool for all those web stuff/languages. its should only be a matter of finding the right plug-ins.
the following items/posts will be about the steps i took/is taking to get eclipse up and working for my needs. they may or may not be correct steps so those of you who may know a better path then please leave your comments.
first thing i did was to download eclipse. the thing is huge! 116 megabytes (compared to homesite’s 14 meg). i got the 3.2 stream stable build instead of the 3.1.2 release version. the downloaded file is a zip archive so all i had to do was unzip the thing to my drive with the “use folder names” option. for my convenience, i created a shortcut of the eclipse executable on the desktop. double-click on the shortcut and eclipse is running. simple. it does default to a java development environment so i have to change that to what i need. a requirement for running eclipse is that i have to have a java runtime environment (jre) installed which i did.
it did occur to me that since my eclipse workspace and installation subdirectories are stored in separate drives, i can just delete the subdirectory where i installed eclipse and just reinstall again. no mucking with the registry or worrying if this or that got installed in the proper system directory.
the next “eclipse” post will be about the plug-ins i have tried.
