Installing Eclipse for Java

Eclipse is an open source collection of programming tools originally created by IBM for Java. Nowadays, most developers in the Java community favor Eclipse as their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of choice. Eclipse lives at http://eclipse.org.

Eclipse has a lot of time-saving features, which I’ll be pointing out as we continue. Keep in mind that, although powerful, Eclipse tends to be very resource-hungry, and so you might want to restart it once a day if it starts running sluggishly.

Although you can do Android development with any favorite text editor or integrated development environment (IDE), most developers seem to be using Eclipse, and thus that’s what I use in this book. If you choose not to use Eclipse, please refer to “Developing in Other IDEs”. Download Eclipse at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. I recommend Eclipse IDE for Java Developers (not the twice-as-large Eclipse for Java EE Developers). You can install it in any directory you’d like.