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Day 1 Using Easy Eclipse - Initial reactions, compliments and gripes

Day One – What I have set up…

I am a little overwhelmed with the amount of features in Eclipse! This is undoubtedly a great thing! I was particularly impressed with the number of features that worked right out of the box… Let me go over quickly some of the features I loved. Please keep in mind that I am developing under Windows Vista, you may or may not be experiencing these problems I am. I did encounter a few problems, and I do offer solutions to my problems here.

Aptana’s CSS code assist –

I really enjoyed this because it actually show’s you what CSS properties are supported by what browsers. I could already see myself using this very extensively when doing CSS work.

My only gripe so far, there is no color help support tool. I would have know exactly what HEX color corresponds to what HEX color. The only TWO I know is #FFFFFF and #000000. I’ll look into this some more, I am probably overlooking a config setting and will update when I find them
Convert Tabs to spaces –

Sadly, I could not get this to work right out of the box. The option was dimmed out the entire time.

I do however, had a quick workaround that did the job.

1. From the aptana default perspective.
   1. On the bottom right hand side, click on the scripts tab.
   2. Right click on the ‘Leading Tabs to Spaces’ option.
      
   3. Edit the script functin to this
      
   4. Save the script, highlight the code and you are set.

The tab conversion tool was great! This was a welcome addition before committing my code to my SVN repository. This will definitely make code more readable when standardizing tab spacing between many programmers.

HTML auto complete worked great! It helped generate some HTML really quickly and readable.

My gripe…No HTML auto-complete for PHP! I am not saying I am a poor programmer but I do occasionally forget the syntax for some PHP functions. I am pretty sure I have overlooked something but I am sure I will get this working soon enough.

From yesterday’s post, I did not mention how to get Apatana installed, here is what I did.

1. Once installed run Easy Eclipse and select your default workspace path.
2. On the top menu bar, click on ‘Help’->’Software Updates’->’Find and Install’
   1. Click on the ‘New Remote Website’.
   2. Select ‘Aptana’ for the name.
   3. Use http://update.aptana.com/install/3.2/ as the remote address
   4. Accept all the license agreements and install Apatana.
3. Restart EasyEclipse if it is required. You will not see anything until you change ‘Perspectives’ . A perspective is like a particular layout. In this case we want to use Aptana’s layout.
4. Click on ‘Window’->’Open Perspective’->’Other’
5. Select ‘Aptana’ as the perspective and save.
6. Your dev environment should now be changed to Aptana’s new environment.

Thats is it for now. I must admit, I am too used to Dreamweaver, but I can already see that EasyEclipse has A LOT of potential. Stay tuned while I get my other issues. I’ll check out the Sync manager…