eclipse plug-ins
i went all crazy and started installing plug-ins left and right — the web standard tools, phpeclipse, amateras, cfeclipse, eclipse perl integration (epic) and even ibm’s web tools for eclipse.
bad idea.
and me being an eclipse noob didn’t know exactly where to start as soon as i called up the workspace. i didn’t know which menu item belongs to which, what does what. rtfm. more of it. duh.
so i hosed the whole eclipse subdirectory and start reinstalling again. but this time i’ll install a plug-in and then evaluate, install plug-in and evaluate… well, you get the idea.
the one i tried out first is, of course, the web standard tools (wst). i can easily create a new page using the available templates but that’s about it. being a homesite user kind of made me a little spoiled and i expected that to put the strong tag would mean pressing ctrl+b or that clicking on the browser icon would call up a browser with my newly created page showing. nope. i think i still have to mess with some of the settings before i can get to where i’m comfortable with. but hey, this is a totally different program that has a totally different way of doing things compared to homesite so this is expected.
since i was hitting a couple of walls with wst i tried putting phpeclipse into the mix. it has its own perspective so that’s a nice touch. they also recommended installing xampp by apache friends to complete the development environment. xammp is a package that installs, among other things, apache webserver, mysql, a php and perl interpreter. i was able to try an earlier version of xampp so this wasn’t anything new. although being able to turn off/on the apache and mysql services with a couple of clicks is really a great improvement in ease of use.
currently, that’s where i am. more updates to come.
